Jim Baumer: Digital Doorway

All good things must end/A final wrap of Niftyfifty 2012

Every trip and mini-vacation must come to an end. My whirlwind celebration in NYC of my 50 years on the planet ended when Mary and I stepped on the JetBlue plane at JFK, bound for Portland, Maine. The 10:45 pm flight was a late one, which had advantages--mainly, we ended up having one last full day, our fifth one, to see cram a bit more Big Apple experiences into our memory banks. It also meant our first day back at work would find us sputtering on fumes.

Niftyfifty 2012 day 5 got off to a rocky start. No hot water at the hotel meant no shower. We also experienced difficulty extending our checkout time, which Hotels.com indicated that we’d be able to do on our final day. This would allow us to do one last major thing, which for us meant walking the Brooklyn Bridge, and then come back to the hotel to change, check out and then, head to the airport.

DoubleTree (our hotel in Times Square), to their credit rectified this major inconvenience and the rudeness of one of their employees. Their quick and effective response to a tweet I made about this indicated a company that is up-to-date on social media and proactive in addressing customer complaints. As a result, DoubleTree/Hilton helped build brand loyalty with the Baumer Niftyfifty birthday team.

Walking the Brooklyn Bridge was wonderful. Tuesday was clear and when we began our journey across the East River from the Manhattan side, the weather was warm and pleasant. When we reached mid-span, in the middle of the river, the north wind had picked up and made us glad we had packed our winter hats and gloves, along with scarves to help ward off the chill.

The walk across was breathtaking and we also got to spend a bit of time on the Brooklyn side, our only trip off the island of Manhattan during our extended weekend. We met a delightful older couple, both dog walkers, at Cadman Plaza Park, just after exiting the bridge. She was from Brazil, arriving in New York in 1953. She was probably in her late 70s and rode the subway every day from Manhattan to Brooklyn, to walk her daughter’s energetic Welsh Terrier, Ziggy. Her friend was 80, a Brooklyn local, who arrived in New York in 1956, from North Carolina. His Italian Greyhoud, Hannah, was very sweet and affectionate towards Mary and me. They gave us a recommendation for pizza two streets over.
We didn’t visit Grimaldi’s, which is the pizza parlor that draws raves on Yelp and among other reviewers. Instead, we opted for Fascati Pizza, just as much a local Brooklyn Heights fixture as Grimaldi’s, probably winning the vote of locals over the hipster crowd.

The pizza was great; piping hot from the oven, with a thin crust, cooked just right that special place between under-cooked and burnt. The combo of tomato sauce, pepperoni, cheese, and black olives was perfect to quiet our early afternoon hunger stoked by the walk across the bridge.

Mary and spent some time walking around Brooklyn Heights before we headed towards the bridge, and the Manhattan skyline beckoning us back across the river. The 45-50 minutes of walking, stopping to enjoy the scenery, snap pictures, hug and snuggle, while soaking in and experiencing one of the city’s icons was one of the best of this wonderful weekend.

I’m not sure why Mary and I never visited the city together before this weekend. Sometimes, life just pulls you along and before you know it, you’re 50, with holes and gaps in your personal American experience. NYC was everything I had hoped for and more.

This was a special birthday present. Our time together, the iconic sites and places we went, NBC and Mary’s makeover are all things we’ll remember years from now.The sights, the sounds, and the uniqueness that is New York make us both want to return again, really soon.

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Nifty Fifty 2012-Makeover Day (for Miss Mary)/Day 4

Mary loves The Today Show. Every morning, while she runs her sales reports and organizes her sales day before rocking the office supply world for W.B. Mason, she’s got the show on the television. Heck, she used to listen on the radio when WCSH-6 simulcast it on FM, before going digital.

Sometimes I give her a hard time (all in good fun) about the show. I’m not a big mainstream media guy. I’m the guy that’s likely to be offering a critique of television news and other elements of television culture, instead. Being at MoMA yesterday, wanting to view the Sanja Ivekovic retrospective “Sweet Violence” kind of places me.

Of course, I’m an American and I know my pop culture, too. It’s what most people talk about and pay attention to. Rather than always being a critic, sometimes I just go with the flow. Am I a sell out? You be the judge.

As part of the whole Niftyfifty 2012 weekend and our Baumer NYC caravan of two, I was whisked down to Rockefeller Center by my lovely wife, the irrepressible Miss Mary, to stand outside of the Today Show studios, and get on TV. Miss Mary had packed a sign, with my Little Jimmy photo (me at like age two), announcing to the world that today, I was turning 50. Mary figured that the sign would be enough to get us on TV.

What I didn’t know and hadn’t considered, is that my wife, who threw on a very practical outfit (some might call it “frumpy,” Mary included), was going to be a prime candidate to get chosen by NBC host Jill Martin for a makeover.

Interestingly, we had seen Martin at Madison Square Garden, doing sideline work for the Knicks on Friday night. When Martin came over and asked Mary to step back from the railing to get a look at her clothes, I thought something was up.

So basically, Mary’s at Rockefeller Center, getting her hair done at the moment. I’ve been told to come back at 11:30 and they’re going to unveil the new and improved Mary Baumer after I don a blindfold, first.

The segment is being taped and I believe it will air on Friday, during that morning’s Today Show broadcast.

We sure are making the most of our weekend in the Big Apple!!

Nifty Fifty 2012-Ellis Island (day 2)

I’ve known since I was small that my Nana and Opa, my father’s parents, came through Ellis Island. They escaped war-ravaged Germany in the early 1920s, and like millions of others coming to this country in search of the American dream that promised them a better life than what their former homelands could offer, they passed through the processing facility located on a small island in New York Harbor.

Mary has heard me mention my grandparents countless times over our nearly 30 years of marriage. It’s nice to know that the person that professes to love you actually pays attention to some of the things that I prattle on about in the course of countless conversations that form the music of a love that’s found its comfort zone. When she was scheming (I mean, planning) my getaway birthday weekend, Ellis Island, and taking care of the details of admission to the site, and knowing what this entailed was a key part of the itinerary and activities she planned for me.

Much like my experience at Vicksburg during the summer of 2010, while on our road trip connected with our son’s journey across America, Ellis Island is an experience that I’m not entirely sure I can do justice to through a mere blog post. Both Vicksburg National Military Park and Ellis Island are operated by the National Park Service. Unlike some, I believe that there still is an important role for government. The role that the National Park Service plays in taking care of America’s past and providing places where Americans can intersect and reconnect with our past heritage is an important function, and is an example of something that government does well in our country.

I had seen old pictures, and at other times, have heard Ellis Island talked about on programs, mainly historical in nature. My awareness and knowledge was somewhat vague. Traveling out to the site by ferry yesterday changed all of that.

The weather yesterday was not ideal for taking a ferry ride out into the harbor. For one thing, the early morning snow, whipped by a steady wind obscured what both Mary and I had been told was a magnificent view of the New York skyline. I actually was a bit irritated by this, initially. There was an advantage to the weather, however that I’ll get back to.

The ferries that service the harbor are nondescript and utilitarian like any ferry might be that transports people from point to point. The boat we were on was very similar to the boats that Mary and I have taken out of Portland in Casco Bay.

A short ride from the shoreline however offered our first views of the Statue of Liberty and Liberty Island. The boat actually stops at Liberty Island where you can disembark and tour the island, although currently, the statue is not open to the public.

There are few American icons that approach the Statue of Liberty for symbolism and what she evokes for Americans and those from other countries. Lady Liberty is a beacon, one that extends a welcome to anyone considering America. Seeing her so close was great, although we decided to forgo leaving the boat and walking the island due to the inclement weather and the bitter cold. Also, the Statue is undergoing a year-long renovation tha began in October and there is no access to both interior and exterior levels.

Mary told me that on a trip to NYC in 1979 with her parents to visit relatives on Long Island that she visited the Statue. At that time she was able to climb up into the crown and what a wonderful experience that had been for her. Looking at the Statue from the deck of the ferry, the monument seems smaller than it really is and it doesn’t seem possible that there is a stairwell that climbs all the way up to the very top of the torch. Actually, no one’s been able to climb up into the torch since July 30, 1916 when the “Black Tom” explosion, an act of sabotage occurred.

The information on the NPS website indicates that the Statue is 305 feet, 1 inch tall, and stands 22 stories off the ground from the ground to the tip of her torch’s flame. When erected in 1886, she was the tallest structure in New York City.

As the ferry pulled up to Ellis Island, the large main facade of the building, immediately recognizable from pictures, beckoned. The architecture is French Renaissance, its red brick trimmed in limestone and granite. It seems to have been a perfect size, large enough to be seen from a considerable distance by the immigrants on the boats making their way to the dock, eager and anxious to disembark after days at sea. It also is of a size and has a look of importance eminent for a builiding and a site that held the fate of the millions that passed through her main examination hall and then were directed elsewhere depending on what status they were assigned.

Mary and I spent about four hours total, riding over and then taking our time going through the Ellis Island museum. The museum itself is a wonderful experience and the self-directed nature of the tour, done via headset and accompanying audio was perfect for someone like me that needs to go at his own pace and check out what interests me.

****

Opa and Nana came across from Germany and were processed at Ellis Island on January 11, 1924. This was the last year that immigrants came through this facility. They were one of more than 12 million that passed through its cavernous main examination hall.

They were 25 and 24 respectively, leaving behind families and their country to come to America for a better life. Reflecting on those hopes, dreams and fears, I was moved many times during my tour, thinking of them, recalling my memories of these two people that I knew--my paternal grandparents.

When I was seven or eight-years-old, I remember accompanying Nana, Opa, and my uncle Bob, driving to Bangor to visit my Aunt Rita and Uncle Charlie. I was excited to get to go with them because I’d get to hang out with my favorite cousin, Rick.

Nana had her bag packed with candy and other treats for the trip. Opa, or “Pa” as many in the family referred to him, was quiet and didn’t speak much. We made the two-hour trip, arrived, had lunch, and no sooner had we sat down after dinner, Pa and Ma were ready to return to Lisbon Falls.

Years later, when I was a bit wiser, or at least owned some life experience, I thought about these two, how a two-hour trip to Bangor was a big deal, and one they rarely made. They never cared to travel far from their home on the corner of Rand and Pleasant. How in hell did they decide to voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to America?

I’m sure the economic deprivation of post-WWI Germany had a lot to do with it. Opa’s brother, Alex, had come to Lisbon Falls first, landing a job at the Worumbo Mill. Given that he was a skilled tradesman and experienced weaver, mills like the Worumbo sought out immigrant laborers like Alex.

I imagine that Alex wrote to his brother, telling him of the opportunities in America and about the small town, ringed with farmland, something Pa would never have in Germany. He might have told him that he’d sponsor Michael, his brother, and Anna, his young bride if they wanted to come. And they did.

Opa was a hard man in many ways. A hard worker who worked long hours in the mill and still came home to chores and other work,, as he had cows and horses, as well as a vegetable garden. These were necessary to feed a family that eventually had six children. My father was the second youngest, born in 1938.

When I was born in 1962, Opa was an older man, soon to retire from the mill, but still working full-time with his gardening, and cutting wood. My father, who build our own small ranch on Woodland Avenue told me stories about how Opa would come over every day and work with my father and his brothers building the house. I got to know him better than my cousins because I got to go with him when he’d go to  “the farm” as it was called, to cut wood, dig potatoes, or perform some other labor, along with my father and Uncle Bob. Even at seven or eight-years-old, I was expected to work as much as I could.

Pa was strong as an ox at 70, and still could keep up with his sons half his age. He’d sometimes get mad at my father or Bob if they screwed something up with the tractor, or didn’t set the saw up to his specifications. It was wrong if it wasn’t done Pa’s way.

At the same time, I got to see a softer side of this stoic German. There were times that I went with Opa all by myself, when he’d drive over to the farm. This piece of property, across the Little River in Topsham was probably a dream come true for an immigrant. Owning land in America, especially a place rich with resources like trees, fields for haying, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a place that he farmed with potatoes.

It’s interesting looking back and remember how Opa stopped growing anything on the farm due to people stealing his crops, as well as vandalizing the tractor that he had always left in the barn he had built there. Afterwards, they had to drive the tractor home and keep it in the barn at the Pleasant and Rand property.

Seeing the actual manifest at Ellis Island after touring the museum helped me frame my grandparents again, a little bit better. I also got to see a picture of the actual steamship that they made the eight or nine day voyage on.

The museum allows visitors to pay a fee and go on a computer to look up records of relatives and others. The woman that was assisting us was very helpful, helped Mary and I understand the manifest, and provided a few more details.

Nana and Opa had a little bit of money, as they weren’t relegated to the 3rd class, or lowest class of passengers on the boat. While the journey was probably an uncomfortable one, it was at least more tolerable than some experienced.

Seeing the handwritten form, with the information about Opa’s brother, their ages, their height, eye and hair color and other notations brought the years rushing back from the past.

One feature that is offered visitors to the facility at Ellis Island is the chance to have a two-page manifest printed on acid-free parchment paper and the opportunity to have a picture of the steamship copied for visitors. I took advantage of that, for a cost of course.

Note:

Ellis Island was the highlight of day two. Mary and I also had the chance to have a wonderful dinner two blocks from our hotel at Trattoria Trecolori. This Italian eatery, located in the Theatre District was wonderful. A delightful meal and two bottles of wine made for a great capstone on another amazing day in the Big Apple.

Nifty Fifty 2012-Day 1

When I was 10, or even 25 for that matter, I never thought about turning 50. The inevitable has arrived, however, and in two days (on Monday), I will be 50 years old.

I actually feel pretty good about being 50. All things being equal, I’m pretty happy where I’m at, now in my middle ages. I don’t think of myself as being old; I’m in the kind of physical shape I haven’t been in since my late 20s after losing weight and starting a fitness routine 2 ½ years ago. I’ve had some success the past 5-6 years moving in the direction I had wanted to earlier, but seemed to lack a few elements, which  I’ve subsequently located. Oh, ’d turn back the clock and redo my last 25 years, given what I know now, and knowing what mistakes to avoid, things to emphasize and focus on, etc. as all of us probably would, but since I can’t control time, I’m happy where I’m at in life. I just wish I wasn’t turning 50.

My wife, Mary, is my life’s partner. We’ll celebrate 30 years of marriage come July, but I’ve known Mary since we were both 17-years-old, when I met her at Lisbon High School. We began dating shortly afterwards, and we’ve been a couple for well over half our lives. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Mary is my best friend. She’s truly been one of life’s special gifts to me.

When I turned 40, Mary, who loves surprises as much as anyone that I know, organized a surprise 40th for me. She managed to loop my father into the ruse, and by the time he brought me home--after walking me all over creation on the farm, the piece of property my German, immigrant grandfather bought shortly after arriving in America and now is owned by my father and uncle--there were about 50 people waiting at my house in Durham to yell, “surprise,” catching me totally unexpected and unawares.

Given Mary’s propensity for surprises, and her thrill in setting them up, I shouldn’t have been surprised when she told me three weeks ago that I needed to schedule time off, the Friday before my birthday, and subsequent days the following week, including Monday, which is my birthday, and the Tuesday after. When I balked saying I had to be back in time for an important work-related commitment on Wednesday, in Waterville, she acquiesced and said, “you’ll be back--if it doesn’t snow.” What the hell did all this mean?  

Of course, I couldn’t ask questions. She developed a way to handle the increased frequency and persistence of my inquiries by using a Peanuts figurine that showed the characters in class and when you press the little button on the figurine, you hear the familiar (if you remember the cartoons) voice of the teacher going “wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.” This was Mary’s way of saying, “it’s none of your god-damned business where we’re going.”

Thursday night, when I came home from work, I had a list of things to pack for the upcoming trip. Still no idea and word where we were going, but given some of the items--winter hat, sweater, gloves, boots, etc.--I knew we were probably staying in the northern half of the U.S. I was thinking Boston (where we went last year), or possibly DC. I had even looked ahead at the Boston Celtics’ schedule, my favorite NBA team, to see where they were playing on my birthday weekend. They were in DC on the 22nd, Sunday. Maybe DC?

I got my itinerary on Friday morning, and knew we were headed to the airport in Portland for an 11:35 am flight. Beyond that, she still wasn’t telling me anything. Given that I hate surprises (or better; I hate not being in control), this was killing me.

****

I’m sitting in the living room of my hotel suite overlooking Times Square in New York City. It is day 2 of what will be a 5-day extended weekend celebration of turning 50. Mary did well in pulling off this surprise, as she got me again!

Day 1 was great. Given that the JetBlue flight had us in town and checked into our hotel by 2:00, we had nearly a full day to get acclimated to our surroundings, even though this was our travel day. Thanks to Mary’s niece, Joaan, who attended college at NYU, she got some great advice about where to stay, decent hotels, etc.

Being in Times Square is great. Midtown Manhattan is a terrific place to be located because there are a wealth of things to do and I know that we’ll have a hard time doing everything that we want to cram into this short window of non-work, leisure time that we have here in the Big Apple.

Last night we went to historic Madison Square Garden and watched the Knicks lose to a not very good Milwaukee Bucks team, at least a team whose record at 4-9 and without a win on the road didn’t seem to indicate that the home Knicks wouldn’t come out with a win. They managed to make the Bucks seems like a playoff contender and lost to the Bucks by 14. Knicks’ fans were not too happy about that and booed lustily at times, in typical New York fashion.

Earlier, we walked to Bryant Park and saw the skating rink, visited New York Public Library, as well as spending some time at Rockefeller Center and visiting the NBC store nearby. We’ll probably do the NBC Today Show fan thing on Monday morning. Mary even has a sign packed that will advertise to the nation that her husband is now 50. Stay tuned for that!

Today, Day 2, we’re heading over to Ellis Island via ferry. This is where my Nana and Opa entered the country in 1924. This will be special for me as I’ve always wanted to see the site and experience first-hand some of the history.

In closing, I absolutely loved Times Square. I know its bright, gaudy, commercial, and all the types of things I rail against in my “America is finished” types of blog postings. Still, experiencing the “City That Never Sleeps” in person, particularly a phenomenon like Times Square, is really cool.

Mary and I haven’t traveled as extensively as some people. But, over the years, we’ve managed to see some of the major U.S. cities, spending time in places like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and for me, finally, New York City. Been through it, but never been in it.

The next few days should be awesome. I’m going to drink in as much of the energy, vibe, and the sights as I can.

Thank you, Mary, for again making the effort to make my birthday a memorable one!

(Oh, and she just got back from H & H Bagels with our breakfast of bagels, of course, and some coffee to get me going for Day 2.)

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Embracing alternative narratives: A review of "Why America Failed"

Reading, particularly reading done to research, learn, and develop a broader understanding of any subject stretches your mind. I’d even hazard going one more step and argue that it provides you with a divergent opinion on whatever your topic of inquiry happens to be.

All too often, the default option for many people is to gather facts that support their presuppositions. Or, I think it’s equally common for most to just ignore the subject, relying on others to define what passes for conventional wisdom.

The reading I’ve been doing the past few years puts me in a different category than most people that don’t read. Even among readers, choosing to tackle tough, nonfiction works forces the brain to work and the wheels to turn a bit, a vastly different experience than reading what's popular or is a best seller. I have a thirst to learn, understand multiple disciplines, and I’m not interested in conventional understanding anymore because the conventional no longer works. Pursuing the intellectual also puts me among the minority in America.

This is nothing new. Richard Hofstadter was sounding the alarm about America’s anti-intellectual bent more than 60 years ago, in The American Political Tradition: And The Men Who Made It, published in 1948. Arguments could be made that Americans have always feared the “egghead,” but at least in 1948, there was a class of Americans that read books, subscribed to magazines like The New Yorker and Harpers, both prime examples of the tradition, and cultivated a certain kind of awareness of popular topics discussed on the cocktail party circuit. Of course, the America of the 1950s was a different landscape than our current one. Interestingly, these “middlebrow” Americans opened themselves up to criticism and derision by Virginia Woolf and others. Imagine that scenario today—we’re fixated on shows like “Biggest Loser” and “The Voice.”

“Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline” is Morris Berman’s latest installment in a trilogy of books by one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics. As he’s been doing for over a decade, Dr. Berman looks at America at this particular juncture and offers a diagnosis that isn’t a pretty one. Believers in the American myth of never-ending progress and technology’s capacity to save us will be sorely disappointed, if not downright angry. They’ll dismiss Berman as a crank, or perhaps worse for someone like Berman that cares about his subject—ignoring him and his work altogether. That would be a tragedy in my opinion, not heeding what Berman has to offer.

It’s hard to be a writer of books like Berman’s mainly because America is now a nation that can’t handle the truth. In his latest book, Berman makes a strong argument that we never were, and the roots of the nation’s inability to see ourselves critically go back 400 years.

In his prior two books on America’s decline as an international power, Berman carefully and methodically made the case that our country had descended into a place of cultural ignorance that was affecting our ability to function as a nation. Beginning first with “The Twilight of American Culture” in 2000, Berman outlined the dire straits facing America, and offered little in the way hope, although he did propose to readers the option of becoming what he referred to as “New Monastic Individuals,” or NMI’s. He gave the illustration that NMI’s would be similar to 12^th century monks bent on preserving and copying classical wisdom during the Dark Ages so that it would be available for the cultural renewal that followed.  Ten years later, I think Berman would disavow a solution, although I think, based upon reading his blog that he might take a step towards the OWS protestors in believing that there is some flicker of hope that this movement might be the act that causes history to happen.

Berman admits that TTAC focused on an “inner barbarism” that was afflicting Americans. In “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire,” Berman looks at the proverbial barbarians at the gate, or “external bararians” or destruction from without.

With the events of 9/11, and America’s subsequent foreign policy response, the dominoes were set in order and five years after DAA came out, it’s obvious how prescient he was when researching and writing the book. America’s inability to follow any kind of historical arc is our undoing. It was maddening to me, after I got over the initial shock of the events at the WTC and turned away from the primary sources of information, how unsophisticated most people were and how wide the support was for the Iraq War. What Berman’s book helped me with was to frame a comprehensive understanding about what was going on with what I began referring to as the “American Empire.” This isn’t new. Gore Vidal had been doing it for decades, and Noam Chomsky and other public intellectuals commonly used the term. 9/11 didn’t come out of left field, or happen in a political vacuum.

Utilizing the Dark Ages as his backdrop, Berman demonstrated that contemporary America expresses (if not proudly flaunts) these outward symptoms of cultural, moral, political, and economic decay, showing clear signs of the triumph of religion over reason; the breakdown of education and critical thinking; legalization of torture; all of this has led to the marginalization of the United States on the world stage. What began under George Bush has only gotten worse under President Obama the past 3 years.

Berman, recognizing the futility of America pulling out of its death spiral, left America shortly after DAA was published. He moved to Mexico where he’s lived ever since. For him that was the logical conclusion that he had arrived at based upon his research and writing. I can respect that.

Back to my review of WAF. There has been ongoing debate among historians about America’s trajectory as a nation.  While the book begins a bit slowly in my opinion, with Berman citing multiple sources, once things get rolling, they move quickly. Berman doesn’t dilly dally around, but quickly makes his point, drawing on the work of Sacvan Bercovitch and Walter McDougall. According the Bercovitch, America has been a nation” blind since birth.” That phrase was actually coined by David Harlan, in describing Bercovitch’s analysis of American culture. McDougall’s assessment; that America’s been a nation of “hustlers” since the get-go is one that Berman comes back to regularly throughout WAF.

America is first and foremost a business civilization. McDougall and others made assertions that the principal goal of North American civilization has always been about ensuring an ever-expanding economy, affluence, and endless technological innovation—which is defined as “progress.” Hence, McDougall’s proposition that America is a “nation of hustlers,” or a people relentlessly on the make.

There is a positive side to all this hustling—the Yankee can-do mentality provided the energy and impetus to manufacture a third of all the world’s manufactured goods a century after America was founded. The downside, or the dark side Berman argues in his book is that we’ve replaced the original good—the commonweal of the early colonies—with a never-ending pursuit of goods. What Jimmy Carter’s advisors described as a nation that was “goal-oriented without goals.”

Berman characterizes our pursuit of hustling, affluence, technology, basically, “progress” as it’s defined in a uniquely American way as a giant steamroller, one that is now going off a cliff.

It’s now painfully clear to me that America is a place where there is an accepted narrative, or story. Anything deviating from that is sure to get you, or others laughed at, scorned, or ostracized in some way. It’s been that way for most of our history.

Critics lacking understanding and the ability to think outside of binary terms will paint Berman as a “doomer,” or overly pessimistic, or possibly, like The New York Times writer did in reviewing DAA, dismissing legitimate criticism by terming it a “rant.” That’s unfortunate because Berman draws on a long tradition of dissenting voices, or as Berman calls these voices, the “alternative tradition,” a tradition that’s run parallel to the hustling ethic, but it's just not given the same position of prominence. Who were some of these voices, or alternatives to the prevailing spirit of affluence, never-ending progress, the “American Dream”? Captain John Smith was one. So was Jimmy Carter. Others included the aforementioned Hofstadter, Henry James, C. Wright Mills, Thorstein Veblen, Henry David Thorough, Sinclair Lewis, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, to name a few—all of them providing Berman with a solid foundation to bring forth his strongest argument yet in this, his final link in his trilogy of books. Interestingly, for what it’s worth, America did seem to move towards the alternative tradition with some vigor during the 1960s and 1970s, but Carter’s “malaise” speech, also called the "Crisis of Confidence" speech, closed the door on it, and it’s been hustling like we’ve never seen, ever since.

Chapter 4, titled, “The Rebuke of History” is the book’s strongest and most compelling, in my opinion. Berman knew he’d be misperceived and wrote about it on his blog. The chapter deals with the Civil War, what Shelby Foote called the defining event in American history.

What Berman does is to use the Civil War, and the southern agrarian tradition as a model  of what America might have been, if something other than a hustling culture. This is bound to get Berman misunderstood, and it did. Douglas Dowd, a writer and thinker I greatly admire and learned about through Berman, took issue with Berman’s premise in an essay and review of WAF for Counterpunch. This didn't come as a surprise, although I'm sure it was a disappointment, especially coming form Dowd, someone that Berman would consider, "one of the good guys." He comments about it on his blog.

Because Berman's premise runs counter to the accepted narrative about the Civil War—that it was fought over slavery, or at least the abolition of it—not as a contest of competing worldviews between the North and South, he’s  diverged from the accepted story and this will cause problems for him; remember, leaving the accepted path will bring you derision, get you ostracized, you’ll be laughed at, or worse, you’ll just end up being ignored.  As Berman carefully constructs his argument, he shows that the contrast between the North, an industrial economy, and the southern agrarian model were not compatible. Hence, industrial capitalism would have to prevail over plantation slavery in the South.

As Berman points out numerous times throughout the chapter, he is not condoning slavery in any way, shape, or form. While slavery figured promptly in the conflict, it was the issue of westward expansion and America’s need for an endless frontier that made the expansion of slavery an issue unacceptable to the North. The Republican answer to poverty at that time in history was westward expansion and new opportunities economically. Southern agrarian values, slave plantations and a slower, less industrial way of life would have removed that. At the same time, as Eugene Genovese points out (and Berman draws upon his work from The Political Economy of Slavery), the South’s one-crop plantation system exhausted the soil, so limiting Southern expansion in favor of the North’s market capitalism and free labor threatened the Southern way of life. Not seceding for the South was tantamount to political suicide.

Berman goes on to trot out a number of interesting theories about whether the war was even necessary, as had been argued by other historians. Reconstruction in essence, was already under way, with the North plundering the South economically. All very intriguing, and yet, I don’t ever remember reading or hearing about any of this in school. I wonder why? Oh, yeah. It doesn’t fall nicely within the accepted story, or narrative that all of us need to get behind and hustle after.

“Why America Failed” is the book that all Americans should be reading. It would help them understand the nation that they proudly hail as something that it’s not, and a national period of self-reflection might cleanse our culture of its hubris. Now I know I’m delusional for even thinking what I just wrote. One can dream, however, right?

As Berman ends the book with what I think is a very honest assessment, he again mentions what led him to leave the country. He also discusses how most writers, when completing a work like this one, contradict what they’ve written by pulling a “rabbit out of the hat” at the eleventh hour. Berman does no such thing and he discusses why he doesn’t. It’s tough to leave readers without a lifeline, or a flicker of hope.

What’s worse, I believe, is to offer hope, and then, pull the rug out from under them. Our current president spent a great deal of his 2008 campaign talking about a hope that was false.

Americans have been fed a steady diet of shit sandwiches for the past 35-40 years. The middle-class way of life promised to all that embraced hard work, or hustling, has become a memory with taillights fading for most of us. Granted, America’s ability to provide a period of sustained economic growth between 1945 and 1970 came at the expense of others around the globe, like Europe and Japan. As Immanuel Wallerstein points out in The Decline of American Power, another book dealing with America as an empire in decline, the U.S. Western Europe, and Japan have been alternating economic boom periods since the 1970s, with each doing well for a decade, or so, while the other two went through declines. This will continue to happen on some level, I believe. Meanwhile, the diet of all but the wealthiest 1 percent won’t change, it will only get worse.

Berman concludes with a reflection on what he sees as the hows and whys of America’s collapse. This collapse, according to Berman, won’t be immediate, or dramatic, but a slow, but steady demise. He calls this Act III (a), where the alternative tradition, existing on the margins, may gain followers and provide some solace for a fraction of Americans. This would be a type of “monastic option.” Politically, it may take the form of an OWS protest movement, with other variations following. Individually, it might mean learning to grow your own food, embracing the best of the “appropriate technologies” that were promoted by E.F. Schumacher in his book, Small is Beautiful, which came out in 1973 and highlighted technologies that were appropriately scaled, and sustainable. President Carter, a fan of Schumacher, invited him to the White House in 1977. Carter was the last American president that publicly expressed doubts about the myth of progress. Maybe learning and beginning to use skills that your grandparents possessed 50-60 years ago that would come in handy and help you weather a post-peak world where petroleum was no longer abundant. These are things that those on the fringes that recognize from what direction the wind is blowing will begin taking steps in preparation for a future that will be vastly different.

One quote that Berman draws upon comes from the late Neil Postman’s work on technology, and it really spoke to me and summed up Berman’s final chapter. Postman, writing about America’s love affair with “technopoly,” that idea of totalitarian technocracy, or what Postman calls, “technological theology.” Americans have prostrated themselves at the altar of technopoly; all forms of cultural life now are directed towards it, and he defines it as a “form of madness,” which in turn created this culture of ours that lacks any kind of moral foundation. I thought that summarized perfectly where we are as a nation.

It was through reading Postman in the mid-1990s that I discovered Dr. Berman, and many other deep thinkers, like Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. While you can flippantly dismiss what I’ve posted here in my review, you do so knowing that I’ve spent the time, and put in the hours reading widely, and consistently across many of the writers that Berman synthesizes in WAF. To me, one of the real gifts that Berman brings, especially with TTAC, DAA, and now, with WAF, is his ability to bring together what might appear to be divergent threads at first. By skillfully weaving together his narrative, albeit one that is an alternative from the accepted canon, and doing it in such a compelling way, it’s far easier to ignore, than it is to refute.

I recommend the book. I’m glad I finally read it, after anticipating it, but being forced to push it aside until I could get through a couple of prior books. It reads well, and while it certainly has plenty of depth, I was able to get through it in two nights, and then, spent a couple of additional days reviewing sections and the abundant footnotes.

In closing, I found a great deal of parallels between Berman and John Michael Greer’s writing, particularly Greer’s longer essays he’s been posting at his blog, The Archdruid Report. There are certainly others that are addressing the place where America is currently at, but both Berman and Greer have become my preferred places to read on the web, when I’m not reading, or continuing to work on my own writing.

Let the sham continue

Tonight, all eyes are turned towards New Hamphshire. The primary season, condensed tighter than ever before, begins, with the Granite State leading the parade with its first in the nation presidential primary.

This year, the GOP is garnering the attention, just the opposite of 2008 when a presidential neophyte, Barack Obama, faced his first primary test among a field of contenders. Hillary Clinton, now heading up foreign policy as Secretary of State, was then considered presidential material, with a Democratic choice of historic proportions. History was writ large, as Mr. Obama became not only the first African-American to head up a major party presidential ticket, but he was the eventual winner of the coveted horse race.

In 2012, the Democratic primary is a mere formality, as the president is running unopposed. The action is among five candidates on the Republican side; Mitt Romney, from neighboring Massachusetts, the proverbial favorite given New Hampshire’s proximity to the Bay State, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and trending strongly of late, Jon Huntsman, the only real moderate in the race, at least the only one daring to make that admission.

It appears as I sit here by the wood stove, typing that Romney has won, turning back both Paul and Huntsman. This is a significant victory for Romney, as no president has never not won both the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire’s primary.

In four short years, I’ve gone from following all the coverage of the candidates to not caring at all who wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and who takes the final contest next November. The energy and time I’ve spent following, and even actively campaigning can be focused on something else. So why the change?

Elections in the U.S. are an illusion. They might have meant something at one point, but they haven’t for so long that it’s odd that it’s taken me this long to get hip to the charade. Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was accompanied by a great deal of euphoria from many corners of the U.S. Here was a candidate, with very little political experience, who defied the odds and ran a campaign infused with hope and promise, especially among younger Americans. Yet, four years later, America is no better than it was before and a strong argument can be made that we’re worse off than we were before the eight disastrous years of the Bush administration. Some saw the election and Obama’s message of hope for the sham that it was—those people were such a small number, however that their lack of buy-in was considered to be overly cynical, and just plain un-American.

Here’s the thing. The handwriting was on the wall and the paper trail told us that most of $750 million the Obama campaign raised (according to the Australian journalist John Pilger) came from Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. These investment-based, capital-intensive financial corporations were the primary players in what eventually became an historic financial collapse. Having put down such a hefty investment on our first African-American president, the tacit expectation was that they were entitled to a return on that  investment, which they eventually received.

My intent here isn’t to single out President Obama, as the same thing would have happened if John McCain had won. Basically, it wouldn’t have mattered who won in 2008, just as it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who wins in 2012. The game is rigged, and as political scientist, Michael Sandel indicates, America is a “procedural democracy,” providing the appearance of one, but in actual content, we are not.

This isn’t new information. Back in 1956, six years before I was born, sociologist C. Wright Mills, a prominent intellectual at the time wrote, “in so far as the structural clue to the power elite lies in the political order, that clue is the decline of politics as genuine and public debate of alternative decisions…America is now in considerable part more a formal democracy than a democratic social structure, and even the formal mechanics are weak.”

If that way in Wright’s time, more than 50 years ago, it is only more so in 2012.

Of course, that won’t stop the chattering classes from offering all manner of analysis (mainly of the horse race, rather than actual issues) and spin as to why Romney won and not the other contenders that shift and shuffle weekly, it seems. This will continue until the Republicans crown their candidate and then, will continue until November.

I’ll have more to say about this and where I believe things are at in America in my next few posts. For tonight, I’ll let the Romney followers bask in the glow of their victory, imbuing it with whatever meaning they come up with.

Sing Sing, Ted Conover, and my own prison story

My reading list for the year tends to develop and evolve as the year trucks along. I have a few books that I’ve noted and plan to read, but my choices shift and change, depending on my own whims, and the need to know particular types of information.

I just finished book #1 in 2012 (just finished last night and have already begun another one). The book I read is Ted Conover’s New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing. I was familiar with Conover’s articles in The New Yorker, but I’d never read one of his books.  I came across it by accident while walking through the stacks at the Maine State Library. That’s not my usual way of picking a book, but I’m glad I saw New Jack because it was an exceptional read.

Conover ended up as a corrections officer at Sing Sing after requesting to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy, and it was denied. Not deterred, he applied for a job as a prison officer and ended up at the Albany Training Academy as a corrections officer-recruit. The training lasted seven weeks, and then Conover got assigned to Sing Sing, the state’s most notorious maximum-security facility. So began what was nearly a yearlong  odyssey at Sing Sing, once a model prison, but now, Sing Sing is one of Americas most dangerous prisons, places where drugs, gang wars, and sex are rampant, and where the line between violator and violated is often unclear.  It’s also a place that changes human beings, both the incarcerated and the people paid to keep and maintain order. Doing so is no easy task and there’s always the daily threat of danger in doing the job.

Conover’s book is an interesting first-hand account of our nation’s sprawling, ever-growing “prison-industrial complex,” a term that I use, along with others, to convey America’s failed solution to things  related to many of our social, political and economic problems. Conover doesn’t go into that level of depth, but there is a sociological thread running through his writing and he provides readers with a firsthand account of what it’s like in the bowels of one of America’s worst prisons. His writing is clear, appears factual, and given my own experiences in a prison setting rife with realism and the mixed emotions anyone with a brain and a conscience has working in one of these hell holes.

I thought Conover did remarkably  well highlighting the human elements of the  job, and helping readers grasp the realities of working in a prison for readers that have never set foot inside a jail, particularly a facility like Sing Sing. He does it with honesty about the inmates, without sentimentalizing them, and about his own failures, challenges, and triumphs as an officer.

Working corrections was probably the toughest job I’ve ever done. What made it even more challenging was being 22 at the time I was hired by the Indiana Department of Corrections, for a med tech’s position at Westville Correctional Center, in Westville, Indiana.

There are a variety of reasons why someone ends up working at a prison. In my case, Indiana’s 15 percent unemployment rate in late 1983 and the birth of our son increased my urgency to find something that would pay more than the slightly more than minimum wage salary I was earning as a security guard.  Being 1,500 miles from home, with a young wife, a new baby, and insurance that was on COBRA helped me get clear really fast—I needed more money, health insurance, and given my limited skills, I had to do something fast before we were out on the street.

Adding to the financial stress was the increasing awareness that the Bible school I had decided to move my pregnant wife and our belongings in a U-Haul truck to this post-industrial wasteland southeast of Chicago (near Gary, Indiana) was a mistake with no financial means to return to Maine, at least immediately.

Hyles-Anderson College in Crown Point, Indiana was a fundamentalist institution that subscribed to the narrow theological framework of Jack Hyles, a bigoted preacher from East Texas that had gained a large following and credibility with a certain kind of born-again Xtian. Looking back, I can’t believe I was so naïve and easily taken by this late 20^th Century Elmer Gantry, but I was. Fortunately, I hadn’t totally lost my mind, or given it over to the indoctrination of Hyles and the acolytes populating the place. In fact, my inability to “get in line” with Brother Hyles’ teachings and policies always had me in hot water at the school.

There were a number of students at the school that had found employment as correction officers at Westville. The ones working third shift often drove directly to First Baptist Church for Sunday morning service that all Hyles-Anderson students were mandated to attend under penalty of demerits from the school. The reason I knew they were coming straight from work was because they were still wearing their officers’ uniforms during the morning service, not the usual Hyles-Anderson uniform of suit and tie that was ubiquitous with Hyles-Anderson preacher boys.  I knew a couple of these guys and one Sunday, I asked Jim Branson, an officer, if there were openings. He told me that they were always hiring at Westville given their turnover and that I should drive out to Westville, about 30 miles east of the college and talk to their HR department and fill out an application.

One thing working in my favor was that Westville had a medical department and handled many medical issues in-house. Because I had direct care experience from a brief stint at the old Pineland Center in New Gloucester, I had an inside track on an opening they had on their psychiatric ward. I applied and received my notification that I’d been hired. I began a month-long training as a med tech in January of 1984.

There were several things about Westville Correctional Center that were important to me at the time. Reading Conover’s book brought me back to that place , 28 years ago. One was the HMO plan that was eligible to enroll us in immediately. This was fully paid, also. That and the $1/hour increase in pay I received was a cause for Mary and me to celebrate.  If this job hadn’t come along, I don’t know what we would have done as our savings were gone, rent was due, and my options were limited at best in a really tough economy.

My classmates in training were all African-American. Most of the inmates were also black, so I was forced to learn adaptability. It wasn’t easy, as being white and from rural Maine had furnished me with a worldview much different than my urban classmates. At the same time, we developed relationships and learned from each other. Actually, they taught me a lot and probably tolerated my naiveté.  I look back at that time, however as a defining one and it helped shape the person that I am today. I also had to develop an additional toughness to deal with inmates, many of them good at intimidation and manipulation, which came from their own abilities to adapt and cope within a prison setting.

In my current job, I’ve been part of several training programs held at Somerset County Jail, as well as two more held at a pre-release center in Hallowell. I’ve never thought twice about going into a jail setting mainly because I had to do it daily for four years back in the 1980s. Jail culture doesn’t intimidate, or cause me stress. It is what it is. I also realize that some of the employers that I’ve tried to recruit for mock interviews for WorkReady might not be as comfortable with the setting, and this might be one of the reasons why it’s been tougher to get their support for the programs we’ve held within a jail setting.

Back to America’s prison industrial complex; we are locking up more and more of our citizens for a variety of infractions, many of them minorities. In Conover’s book, written in 2000, he mentions that since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, the former No. 1 jailer, the United States has run neck-and-neck with Russia in the race to become the world leader in rates of imprisonment. At the time of publication, Conover notes that “…we lock up six times as many citizens per capita as England, seventeen times as many as Japan. Prisons and jails in the United States now hold nearly two million people, meaning that one out of every hundred and forty residents is behind bars. In the nineties, while Wall Street was booming, a third of the black men in this country between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were either incarcerated or on probation or parole.”

I’m sure those rates have only increased since the book came out. We have created our own law and order conundrum and the numbers of people, mainly men that now have criminal records affects their ability to work.

Conover’s book looks at some of these issues, but mainly, he gives readers a better sense of what I learned from my own firsthand experiences; prisoners are human beings and aren’t much different than you and me. That’s not a popular notion with people that have no experience with our penal system, or the “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” types that usually run for president.

My 2011 reading list and synopsis of books read

I’m thankful my mother marched me down to the Lisbon Falls Community Library and signed me up for their summer reading program when I was nine-years-old. I caught the reading bug back then and haven’t looked back. In high school, my best friend, Dave Gray, pushed me to expand my comfort zone and read books that were a stretch and difficult—like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. I was a jock at the time and he wasn’t, but I saw him modeling being smart and I wanted to be an athlete that transcended the dumb jock stereotype.

This year, my goal was to read three books a month and 36 for the year. I fell a bit short, ending up with 33 books completed by year-end 2011. That’s still a solid number. I’d be curious to hear from others that have read more. Drop me a note if you’d like at jim(dot)baumer(at)gmail(dot)com.

I don’t always tackle the easiest books, and in fact, most of what I read is nonfiction. These are books full of ideas and most of them are not your run of the mill bestsellers. If you read bestsellers, I’m not judging you. I will encourage you, however, to tackle a “tougher” book now and then.

Again this year, I’ve had my thinking challenged and broadened. That’s a good thing. I remember our former governor, Angus King, a leader Mainers could be proud of, regularly championing reading and saying that “readers are leaders.” I wholeheartedly believe that today. If you want to lead, pick up a book now and then. I wonder how many books our current governor read in 2011?

Here are my 33 books for 2011 and a brief synopsis for each one. This will also serve as my last post of 2011.

1. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger; 357 pages

This is the story of the 1988 Permian High School Panthers football team, from Odessa, Texas. In Texas, everything is bigger than elsewhere and football epitomizes that spirit of bigness.

Bissenger followed the team and its players for the entire 1988 season. He demonstrates the hold that high school football has on the team, its followers, and the town of Odessa. The book was selected in 2002 by Sports Illustrated as the fourth-greatest book written about sports.

2. Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend by Bill Russell; 208 pages

Bill Russell is arguably the greatest player to ever lace up the high tops and play in the NBA. His coach, the inimitable Red Auerbach was Russell’s coach for the first 10 years of his career and later served as Celtics’ general manager while Russell became player coach.

This book captures Russell, the proud African-American, unwilling to bend to the pressures of a white culture and a city that hasn’t always been kind to black athletes. Better, the book captures the special bond forged between Russell and Auerbach.

3. Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con that is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi; 252 pages

If there’s a better book out there that lays bare the financial crisis of 2008, I don’t know of it. Taibbi, a terrific political journalist who often is compared to the late Hunter S. Thompson (by other lazy journos), writes with passion, irreverence, and plenty salty language about how Americans have been bled dry by a tiny oligarchy of extremely clever criminals and their henchmen in government. One example is laying the blame for the financial crisis on the doorstep of former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, whose Ayn Randian laissez-faire approach to regulation led Taibbi to title a chapter in the book, "The Biggest Asshole in the World," his personal paean to Greenspan.

Taibbi’s one of my favorite writers on politics because of his equal opportunity missives he regularly launches in his Rolling Stone columns.

4. The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era by Janice Peck; 288 pages

Can’t remember how I found this one, but it was an informative read. Peck deconstructs the myths about the iconic Winfrey, and peels back the veneer, revealing the intersection between politics and culture in the U.S.

5.  Shelby Foote: A Writer’s Life by C. Stuart Chapman; 344 pages

Shelby Foote’s three volume history of the Civil War is one of the great works of American history. Chapman was given unprecedented access to Foote, a somewhat recalcitrant writer, especially in sharing details of his life and writing. I appreciated the insights into writing and craft that I picked up from the book.

6. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell; 304 pages

Gladwell is one of my favorite writers. I rarely ever run across a Gladwell essay that doesn’t leave me breathless by his writing talent. This book, one of his best, introduces readers to the “10,000-hour rule,” which is one of the better explainations of what success requires. If you’ve never read Gladwell, add this book to your list of books to read in 2012. Do it!!

7. What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell; 448 pages

You already know how I feel about Gladwell’s writing. This one is a compilation of his essays, mainly from The New Yorker, where he is a regular contributor and a magazine that features the long-form essays that I can never get enough of. Read his essay on Ron Popeil, America’s consummate pitchman—maybe Gladwell’s best.

8. A Question of Values by Morris Berman; 256 pages

Berman is a cultural critic now living in Mexico as an ex pat. This book gathers a series of his essays, none of them particularly optimistic about the future of Berman’s former country. Berman, along with Chris Hedges, and possibly James Kunstler, are the most caustic of a group of writers that posit that America is an empire in demise. I can’t say I take issue with that premise.

Berman helps his readers reconsider so much of the mindless pap and propaganda that we’re fed each and every day. Highly recommended.

Berman is also a devoted blogger and his blog serves as a community where discussion of topics germane to his books and worldview takes place. The blog (and comment section) also served as a source for new book selections, like Douglas Dowd's book.

9. A Southerner Discovers the South by Jonathan Daniels; 346 pages

Sometimes it’s good to read something written from a prior time. Daniels’ book, recounting his 10-state trip in 1938 across the South gives readers a real sense of what the South was like during the Depression, and prior to FDR’s New Deal programs kicking in, and what those programs meant to the South.

10. This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper; 339 pages

I needed a book for the beach on Memorial Day, the true start of summer and beach going in northern New England.

Tropper is funny and this book, about a crazy Jewish family sitting Shiva is piss your pants funny. This book was a nudge to me, reminding me to mix a little fiction into my reading choices, especially for those long, lazy summer days.

11. The Intellectuals and the Flag by Todd Gitlin; 192 pages

I wanted to read something over the 4^th of July that tempered much of the mindless flag fever that characterizes the holiday in our country. Gitlin, a public intellectual, authored this pithy book on the thorny questions that trouble some of us; the book is measured on the issues of nationalism and the faux patriotism that most right-wingers try to force down the throat of those that refrain from mindless jingoism. Gitlin does a good job modeling how to be an American without holding a mindless devotion bordering on servitude.

12. How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu; 320 pages

Again, I’m reminded that I read very little fiction. Mengestu was in Lewiston to give a reading at Bates and I thought I'd pick up the book and read it before getting it signed. I was somewhat disappointed in the book. Mengestu is a good writer, but I didn’t care for his characters.

13. My Reading Life by Pat Conroy; 352 pages

Conroy is an immensely popular writer—not the norm for my reading choices. Writers should read and Conroy reveals that he is a voracious reader. He makes the claim that reading saved his life—pretty heady stuff, but it validates the importance of reading.

I especially enjoyed many of the authors and stories he shares, in particular, his reverence for James Dickey, the great southern writer and author of Deliverance.

This was the first book I read on my new NOOK.

14. The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt; 256 pages

A colleague mentioned this book over and over again in reference to creating local, sustainable economies. I suggested that a group of community leaders I was meeting with in Kennebec Valley read the book to help frame our discussion about regional economic development. I’m not sure how many of them did, but I did and I found Hewitt’s story about Hardwick, Vermont, pertinent, compelling, and an example of the potential of local agriculture to transform local and regional economies. This book should be read by anyone interested in sustainable economic development and building a strong local economy. Governor LePage? John Butera? Members of the EDCM? Bueller? Bueller?

Another book I read on my NOOK.

15. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald; 304 pages

When Whitey Bulger was captured in June, I wanted to read something that separated the South Boston gangster from the myths that had developed around him on one hand, and the loathing for him perpetrated by Boston shock jock Howie Carr,someone I’d characterize as an ideological gangster.

MacDonald’s book kept coming up while doing some online research, so I decided to read this memoir of his life. It provided some grim details growing up in the Old Colony Housing Development in the 1970s in South Boston. In All Souls, MacDonald describes a South Boston we're not used to hearing about: a neighborhood devastated by drugs, organized crime, and extreme poverty, quite different from the (Hollywood?) portrayals of Southie as a tight-knit working-class enclave ruled by strong family values.

The book offers a portrait of Bulger as gangster and FBI informant in Southie, who brought the drug trade into the neighborhood, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of young people due to suicides, murders, and overdoses. Despite all the nastiness that characterized MacDonald’s growing up, he also writes about how proud and loyal the residents were to be from Southie, including MacDonald himself, and how some of the best elements of the neighborhood have been wiped out along with the worst due to gentrification.

A well-written, nuanced book, and one of my faves from last year.

16. Deliverance by James Dickey; 278 pages

Most Americans only know of Dickey’s novel from the Hollywood movie starring Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty and the rape scene perpetrated by the local hillbillies. Typically, most will never read Dickey’s best known work, which is too bad.

I became interested in reading the actual novel after Pat Conroy mentioned Dickey in his book, My Reading Life, and Dickey’s influence on his writing when Conroy had him as a poetry teacher at the University of South Carolina.

The New York Times offered this about Dickey’s novel:

“Deliverance” is the kind of novel few serious writers attempt any longer, a book about wilderness and survival whose DNA contains shards of both “Heart of Darkness” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It tells the story of four mild, middle-class men from suburban Atlanta who embark on a canoe trip, snaking down a remote Georgia river that will soon disappear beneath a dam. In the woods they find boiling rapids and two sinister mountain men. Before the novel is over, the carnage is nearly complete: three men have been crudely buried, one has been raped, and the survivors have had the bark peeled from their modern sensibilities.

I can’t add much more than to say, “read it!”

17. Labor Day by Joyce Maynard; 256 pages

When you commit to reading more than a handful of books, little bonuses come your way in the form of books that you’d never think of reading, but afterwards, you are thankful you did. Maynard’s book is one of them.

This novel was sitting on Miss Mary’s pile of books that show up in our bedroom after she makes a trip to the Portland Public Library. The jacket copy roped me in and Maynard’s talent as a writer took it from there. Another one of my infrequent fiction back road diversion that I’m glad I occasionally take and that make my life richer.

18. Look at Me by Jennifer Egan; 544 pages

Another fiction read. Egan is so damned good that it’s scary. This one came from a mention in Adbusters August issue, the same one that launched the Occupy Wall Street movement. That means Egan is a subversive, right?

A longer read, but one I knocked out in two days while on vacation in August. Look At Me tackles issues of image and beauty without being preachy. Egan’s plot, peppered with insights, offers an impressive prescience about our newly altered world (the book was released just after 9-11). The release date unfortunately led to the book reaching fewer readers than it should have.

I will definitely tackle Egan’s latest book at some point in 2012.

19. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger; 288 pages

Over the past two years, I’ve been catching up on some of the classics I never read in school, or if I did read them, they went right over my head. In 2010, it was Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. This year, it was Salinger’s oft maligned classic, Catcher in the Rye, a bit shorter than Melville’s tour de force.

The book is now 60 years old, but Salinger’s skill at capturing the universal themes of teenage angst, alienation, confusion, are timeless. Of course, these themes continue to cause Salinger’s classic to be one of the most challenged books, according to the American Library Association. Often the challengers are ignorant fucks (a shout out to Holden Caulfield on that expletive) that haven’t read the book. That never stops these narrow ignoramuses, however.

Read this one over two days on my August vacation, along with Egan’s novel. This was a great vacation and my literary excursions only added to its quality.

20. Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire by Matt Taibbi; 245 pages

Back to rocking the nonfiction and essays this time. This one came courtesy of another Baumer reading machine, our son, Mark. He made a trip to Borders when everything popular had been picked over and books were marked down to 70-90 percent of their list prices. Mark ended up coming home for a visit with a mountain of books. There are advantages to swimming upstream, and this is one of them.

This put Taibbi back on my nightstand, this time shining an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders.

As an aside; Taibbi spent time in his early 20s in the middle of an empire running down--Russia--writing for the Moscow Times, expat publication The Exile, and playing some basketball in the Central Asian version of the NBA. This personal "sent to Siberia" experience of his was great preparation for his U.S. return and keen perspective on our own implosion, offering some of the more insightful journalism trickling from the fourth estate.

For those of you that think Rush Limbaugh speaks truth to power, or Ann Coulter is your favorite author, read some Taibbi. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll have to admit that we’re pretty well fucked in our current political configuration, living in this failing empire in decline. Note: if you like the “empire in decline” motif, check out some of Gore Vidal’s stuff, most of it written well before Taibbi picked up the mantle and has been running with it.

21. My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe; 320 pages

A memoir about Howe’s foray into Korean culture, viewed through the lens of convenience stores. Howe at the time was writing for The Paris Review, the iconic literary magazine, whose editor-in-chief and one of the founders, the late George Plimpton, is an icon in his own right.

This is a breezier read than many of my 2011 selections, but breezy doesn’t mean shallow.

Howe’s a terrific writer and this is a worthwhile read for anyone that’s a fan of memoirs.

22. Honky by Dalton Conley; 224 pages

Conley is a respected sociologist who is best known for his contributions on how socioeconomic status is transmitted across generations. This is his memoir of growing up in a very strange family, with two artistic parents who chose to be under-employed and subject Dalton and his sister to growing up in public housing projects, often being the only whites in the neighborhood.

Not as entertaining as Howe’s memoir, but solid all the same.

23. The Best American Essays 2008; 320 pages

I love the essay. I’m more enamored of it than ever, especially since I began teaching a narrative nonfiction course for Lewiston Adult Ed. I teach the essay and this series, edited by a different writer each year, is a great introduction to the art of essay writing for my students.

This particular edition is edited by Adam Gopnik.

If you know this series, you know it’s a great concept.

24. This Land Was Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home by Caitlyn Shetterly; 256 pages

The story of a Maine couple, as told by NPR contributor Caitlyn Shetterly, of their harrowing journey to California and then back to Maine, finding refuge with Shetterly’s mother after their dream crashed and burned.

This book captures the vibrations of why things aren’t right in America, but does it without being strident, or overtly political. That doesn’t mean that Shetterly pulls any punches. George Bush fans will probably brand her a liberal, but who cares. She is a tremendous storyteller and bares her soul, shares intimate details of her marriage, what unemployment does to men when they can’t provide for their families, etc. A wonderful book and definitely a read that’s stayed with me.

25. The Civil War in American Culture by Will Kaufman; 193 pages

The American Civil War is seen as the definitive American War, possibly due to the well-documented gore and controversy of the war which, because it was recorded for generation after generation to study, increases the appeal of the conflict. Kaufman details how the twentieth and twenty-first century media forms play a huge part in public perception of history and with the great influx of Civil War media available it is not surprising that it was and still is such an immense cultural phenomenon.

This is a short read, but short doesn’t equate to shallow. Kaufman is a gifted writer, breaking down dense sociological and historical concepts into bite-sized pieces that readers with an interest in depth of subject will appreciate. Readers of romance novels may want to go elsewhere.

26. The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the U.S. Since 1776 by Douglas Dowd; 364 pages

I ended 2011 on a roll with my reading, tackling the densest, most provocative books during the last three months of the year.

Dowd’s book, written back in the 1970s when I was entering high school, helped me finally articulate this feeling I’ve had for more than 30 years that something’s gone awry in America. This book allowed me to frame my own experiences, and those of my family of origin growing up, particularly the structural economic changes that we were living through in the early 1970s, and now clearly see the downward march that members of the 99 percent have been making ever since. This is the story that corporate media, left or right don’t tell you and insist is flawed.

Dowd’s the kind of historian and writer, given his life experiences and vast intellectual curiosity that is an absolute must to have on your reading list if you are interested in breadth and depth, intellectually.

I could easily go on much, much longer, but given the number of books I have left to provide thumbnails on and the length already of this post, I’ll end by saying that Dowd is my big discovery of 2011. It’s really rather sad for me, given that Mr. Dowd is 93, retired from teaching this year, and is close to the end of his intellectual career. His books, however, allow his ideas and wonderfully readable style to live on for as long as his books are available.

Capitalism isn’t worthy of our veneration and this book of Dowd’s as well as others, like his latest (and probably last book), Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis (which is on my 2012 list) should be read by ignorant clowns that trumpet a system that continues to grind most of us to dust.

27. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy; 256 pages

This one wins the prize as having the most provocative cover of the books I read in 2011. The photo, taken in 1968, of members of the Black Panthers, dressed in black leather and berets, and the Young Patriots Organization (with their Confederate flag patches sewn on ragged jean jackets) seem so incongruous in today’s controlled media environment. Yet is symbolizes that time period in a simple snapshot.

I discovered this one at this year’s Boston Book Festival while visiting the Melville House (the book’s publisher) booth, and I was again reminded how much history has been shunted down the memory hole and why Americans know almost nothing about dissent and protest. What they do know has been trivialized, or made into a sanitized Hollywood version that when dissent does rise from the ashes, like the Occupy movement, Americans stand there, slack-jawed and bewildered. Because of this, many Americans who ought to be supporting efforts to revive protest and dissent, instead fall into lock step with the corporate media, Fox News, and the 1 percent, criticizing, and worse, characterizing the movement inaccurately.

Sonnie and Tracy’s book read like a novel to me. I realized how my own understanding the 60s and early 70s had been framed by the New Left’s narrative, which wrote the poor and the white working class out of protest politics. Rather, the working class is often shown solely as being in opposition to the protests against the Vietnam War, or Civil Rights, instead of occupying the front lines, like many of the groups highlighted by Sonnie and Tracy in this seminal work of history. Because of this, poor and working class people often become pawns to political shenanigans and charades, voting and advocating against their own best interests (see Thomas Frank).

My favorite books are the ones I buy and keep coming back to time and time again as a reference point and to check myself when I feel I’m being led adrift by the incessant propaganda that surrounds me and surrounds all of us. This is that kind of book, the book that quickly becomes dog-eared, which is a good sign.

This is also the kind of book I tell others about and they nod, but I know they’ll never read it, which makes me realize how small the numbers are of people that care to really know the full story of our country, not the narrowly defined CliffsNotes version that frames the short filmstrip running behind the eyes of most Americans.

28. The Raw Deal: How Myths and Misinformation About the Deficit, Inflation, and Wealth Impoverish America by Ellen Frank; 248 pages

Another one of those books that closed out my year of reading that further solidifies my understanding of why things are fucked, when they began going south, and what it would take to get the train back on the tracks. Of course, most won’t bother reading Frank’s book—don’t confuse me with the facts is their refrain.

My one book recommendation for Governor LePage, his Chief Economic Advisor, John Butera, and State Treasurer (and blogger-in-chief) Bruce Poliquin. If they were open to new ideas, it might back them off their narrow doctrinaire perch that has Maine headed down the wrong path towards a dead end. For some reason, I doubt it will be showing up on their reading tables or night stands in 2012.

29. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville; 64 pages

Melville’s forgotten novella is the shortest of my 2011 reads. Bartleby’s signature, “I would prefer not to” is something I’m getting better at saying and will utilize often in 2012 to weed out the things I’d prefer not to be doing.

Written in 1853, the novella still has resonance 150+ years later.

Part of Melville House’s wonderful house novella series.

30. Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman by Cathy Wilkerson; 432 pages

Cathy Wilkerson was a member of the 1970s radical group, the Weather Underground, along with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, friends of President Obama that he had to disavow to become president. It's all part of America's very narrow window of what's accepted in mainstream circles.

Wilkerson came to the attention of the police when she was leaving the townhouse belonging to her father after it was destroyed by an explosion on March 6, 1970. She was part of a group that had been constructing a nail bomb in the basement of the building, intended to be used in an attack on a non-commissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey that night.

This is Wilkerson’s firsthand account of being a member of one of the New Left’s most notorious and maligned groups from the 1960s and early 1970s. It’s an honest look at how a sheltered, upper middle-class girl becomes radicalized and eventually, is forced to go underground with her young daughter, and her eventual surrender to the police.

31. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard; 384 pages

Probably the book that I’ve devoted the most blog time to here at Digital Doorway. There’s a reason why—it’s a damn fine book and Woodard is one of Maine’s very own treasures and best writers, as well as being a crack journalist. What’s great about this book is the national run it’s been getting, and Woodard is no longer one of Maine’s best kept secrets.

If you are a friend, or a close acquaintance, you’ve no doubt heard my personal recommendation and endorsement of the book. Hopefully you took my advice and bought it for yourself and/or gave it as a Christmas gift. If you haven’t, get it and read it soon. It will help you cut through the bullshit that passes for political analysis during the run up to the 2012 presidential election. You’ll even start sounding like one of those folks that dare to diverge from the herd, and can frame politics and culture more broadly than the typical binary fashion of left/right, liberal/conservative, red/blue way of most.

Here is a semblance of a review I did of Woodard’s book, synthesizing it with another one of my fave reads from 2011 (just below). This is my post from Woodard’s book launch I attended at Portland Public Library, where I bought the book and got it autographed by Colin.

32. The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer; 246 pages

Do you know anything about peak oil? How about catabolic collapse? Do you realize that you are living in an empire that’s in demise? I didn’t think so. You could be a bit more well-rounded in your understanding of the world and less baffled by the events that happen and seem to be disconnected, but actually are related by reading this book—but you won’t.

Greer is a writer that I “found” mid-year and have become a regular devotee of his well-written and informative blog, The Archdruid Report, where he posts a long essay every week that will turn your thinking upside down and maybe, even help point you in a new and better-informed direction.

33. Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas by various writers; 330 pages

This year, I focused on Advent (rather than Christmas). Consequently, this was one of my best holiday stretches ever. For someone that’s a bit of a combination Grinch/Scrooge this time of year, that’s saying something. This book had a lot to do with helping turn my mindset and appreciate the season in a way I haven’t before.

This is considered a re-read, as I’ve had the book for a decade and have read through its daily readings in the past. Still, I consider it one of my books for the year, as I devoted reading time and thinking to the words I was taking in each day.

Pick it up and incorporate it into your own personal Advent traditions next year.

This ends my year end reading list and summary of the books that informed me over the past 12 months. Books are amazing, serving as tools that can help expand our thinking, help us become more well-rounded, informed citizens. They also hold the power to transform. That’s why those in power try so hard to keep these types of books out of our hands. They don’t censor them—they merely create white noise (television, social media, popular culture, techno gadgets) that divert our attention from them. It’s Huxley’s Brave New World concept. BTW, add that one and George Orwell’s 1984 to your 2012 list. In fact, if you haven't read them, they should be at the top of your reading list heading into the New Year.

I’m thankful that I’m a reader. Thank you, Mom, for setting me on this pathway when you walked me down to Lisbon Falls Community Library 40 years ago. My life was changed and I’ve been on a special journey ever since. Because of this, libraries have always had a special place in my heart and in my life. Special props to the Maine State Library, a regular haunt and a special resource in my life, given that I don't have a local library in the town where I currently live.

My goal in 2012 is less about reading a certain number of books, and more about just reading to read. At the end of this next 12-month stretch, I’m sure I’ll have a significant stack in the completed pile once again.

Happy reading and Happy New Year!!

Seasonal paradox

I have a new essay posted at Dirigo Blue, one of Maine’s top progressive news sites. Gerald Weinand has done an outstanding job, dedicating hours and hours of time each week that I know it takes to gather, compile, and write about the politics of our state. Given that the number of reporters at Maine’s daily newspapers continues to contract, sites like Weinand’s have become increasingly important in reporting what’s going on in Augusta and keeping those with an open mind, informed.

The essay developed over the weekend. I wanted to weigh-in on the anecdote-driven article that Scarborough’s Christine Rousselle wrote last week about welfare fraud that she claims she witnessed while working at Wal-Mart during a summer job. Because her article fits the presuppositions of many on the right so well, she’s being lauded for an article that contains a great deal of dubious information. Some might even call it conjecture. I read somewhere that this young lady has her sights set on being the next Ann Coulter. She’s off to a good start, tossing red meat to the red state crowd.

Interestingly, Rousselle attends Providence College, a Catholic school that follows the Dominican tradition. Dominicans are famed for their intellectual acuity, as well as a focus on poverty and meekness and a devotion to truth. None of this seemed apparent in her article. Meekness and devotion to truth are also not attributes that someone like Ann Coulter is interested in cultivating, and she obviously cares little about the poor, other than using them as targets of her scorn and derision. So in that sense, young Rousselle seems well on her way. [One side note to young Ms. Rousselle. Your newfound fans will hail and slobber over your articles as long as you give them what they need—constant validation of their beliefs. Try writing something critical of conservatism and see how that goes.-jb]

The essay was an attempt to tie together my own spiritual musings prompted by Advent (rather than Christmas), with what I view as a troubling harshness that far too many are exhibiting, especially at a time of year when we ought to be more charitable. Personally, I think charity should be in force all year long, but then again, I’m not a right-winger, and I am not someone interested in piety for piety’s sake like many so-called believers.

I’m willing to cut this young lady a bit of slack, given my own journey and involvement with groups and movements I’m not real proud to say I was a part of at points in my life, mainly when I was not much older than the writer. I had my own little go-round with conservative politics until I saw how one-dimensional their frame of reference really was. Having said that I expect her to be as tough on others milking the system via corporate welfare, as she was on those she indicates were engaging in welfare fraud. I think it’s unlikely that she will, especially given her desire to emulate Coulter and how well her article was received by those committed to continuing to bash poor people.

Working my way through many of the readings on the season from Watch For The Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, I’m reminded again how pathetic most of the churches in America that preach a conservative brand of theology are; basically, they’ve become nothing more than apologists for unfettered capitalism and even greed, no longer offering a prophetic witness and a countermeasure to the excesses of our market economy and the harm engendered by it. Chris Hedges in a Truthdig column from two weeks ago offered his own indictment towards the American church:

The mainstream church, battered by declining numbers and a failure to defiantly condemn the crimes and cruelty of the corporate state, as well as a refusal to vigorously attack the charlatans of the Christian right, whose misuse of the Gospel to champion unfettered capitalism, bigotry and imperialism is heretical, has become a marginal force in the life of most Americans, especially the young. Outside the doors of churches, many of which have trouble filling a quarter of the pews on Sundays, struggles a movement, driven largely by young men and women, which has as its unofficial credo the Beatitudes.

There’s nothing in Hedges’ piece that I take issue with. It’s one of the reasons why I’m no longer connected in any way with organized religion. The abdication of much of evangelical and other conservative branches of American Christendom of their responsibility to counter all that’s gone wrong about capitalism, the growing disparity of wealth in our country, our pursuit of war, and instead, aligning the teachings of Jesus with these things he clearly opposed, including the shoddy way we treat people on the margins makes this kind of religion ineffective, and I’d argue, meaningless.

I guess bashing those below you on the socio-economic ladder gives people some sense of satisfaction. Experts indicate that Americans lack the ability to empathize with those that are different than them. Perhaps many bashing the poor have never struggled to feed their families, or haven’t experienced a period of economic instability. I’m not sure what it is.

Some, like cultural Morris Berman, remind us that we're less empathetic than ever, citing studies, like a recent one at the University of Michigan covering a 30-year period (1979-2009) that revealed a 48 percent decrease in empathy among college students at that time, and a 34 percent decrease in the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. According to Berman, the study suggested that this wasn’t surprising “in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.” The very opposite of what scripture and religion once held up as virtues to be cultivated.

Whatever the causes are, it’s chilling to think that in a country where life may continue to be difficult, with jobs slow to return, poverty may become a reality for some of these intent on bashing the poor at present. Let's hope we find a way back to values of caring and empathy, again. Otherwise, the future might be a very tough slog for many of us.

Cultural fissures, descending down the peak, and contemplating a regional future

Most of what passes for analysis of national issues today—whether economics, politics, healthcare reform—is the informational equivalent of junk food; high in calories, with little nutritional or lasting value. With each subsequent annum, the simplification of serious thought is sequentially dummed down, growing ever more truncated, lacking the required depth of its respective subject.

The need to condense and drain any topic of substance so that it allows delivery by a two-headed hydra offering the typical left/right, black/white reduction for every discussion, as if on cue, is painting us increasingly into a cul de sac that at some point we won’t be able to exit.

That’s why I find it so refreshing when I come across a writer and a book that dares to deliver ideas that move away from hackneyed positions that have been beaten to a bloody pulp. Merely screaming louder than your opponent doesn’t mean you have the superior argument. Resorting to overused talking points, either right or left will find me moving on in search of something that forces me to think about the proposition posited.

Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America is a book that takes a very different look at politics in America at this point in time. Thoroughly, and in a very engaging manner, Woodard takes his readers back through our history, considering settlement patterns for the continent that includes the United States, and our neighbors to the north and south; Canada and Mexico.

There is an accepted premise that what ails the U.S. (among many maladies affecting the patient), is the lack of national consensus and a concern that we’re more divided as a country than ever before. Depending on where you sit on the ideological spectrum will determine your solution as to how to bring us back to the place where we are able to find common ground. Often, the narrative involves some variation of, “we’ve strayed from our core values,” whatever those may be. The so-called “Founding Fathers” are regularly invoked as a rod and compass, with the offer that a return to some prior faithfulness, with an embrace of their intended views on our nation will result in us being put back on the proper path. Conservatives often cite liberals, blaming them for this for the divergence from this nostalgic nod to a golden age in American politics and society, whenever that might have been, most often noted as a time well before now.

As Woodward points out in the introduction to his book, these “calls for unity overlook a glaring historical fact: Americans have been deeply divided since the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles, and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain, each with their own religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics.” So much for the idea of getting back to those good ‘ole days of unity, eh?

American Nations is a work of synthesis. By this, I mean that Woodard draws upon a number prior works that touch on culture and in particular, the place where culture and geography intersect.  What makes books like this one particularly important, in my opinion, is the way that they direct readers back to other important and seminal works on the subjects tracked. In Woodard’s case, they are works like the on regionalism done by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed. Woodard take’s Fischer’s idea that four “British Folkways” were transported across the Atlantic during the colonial period and make up the regions that Woodard characterizes in his book as Yankeedom (New England), the Midlands (the Midwest, including Pennsylvania and Ohio, Tidewater (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia), and Greater Appalachia. By building on and synthesizing  Fischer’s ideas on social history and our British origins, and then building on works by other scholars, Woodard enhances his own extensive research and ideas, weaving all of it together into a strong and readable narrative that makes it an essential read for our present point in time.

If you know Woodard as a writer, you're already aware of his skills as a thorough researcher. His book, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, is one of the best books written on the state of Maine. In it, Woodard dispels much of the mythmaking that goes on in attempting to recreate Maine as something it’s not—an idyllic paradise for tourists among others.

In that work of history, Woodard skillfully painted a picture for readers of Maine’s past, and then brought it up to date, detailing many nuances that make the culture of the state so unique.

Back to this idea that America has some set of cherished principles; simply stated, we don’t and never have had an overarching framework developed by men that were imbued with some special manifest. To continually come back to that frame of reference (the Founding Fathers) is sloppy, yet it serves as the basis of much of the analysis, particularly taken to the extreme by Fox and other similarly ideological-oriented news sites and commentators.

The timing of Woodard’s book and its release are important. There is a danger that books like this one might get overlooked, especially in the crowded marketplace of new releases. I credit Viking for the exquisite timing of the book, given that it ties so well into the current Republican horse race for president. A group of lesser lights would have been hard to imagine even 10 years ago, but politics has changed dramatically. Woodard’s trenchant analysis of America that is plausible, researched, and based in a historical framework and understanding that many could be capable of seeing (if they take off their rose-colored, ideologically-tinted eye shades), makes American Nations an important contribution to our national understanding of what we need to consider and set forth as national priorities if we have any hope of solving some of our greatest challenges since our founding back in the 18^th century. This is probably why the book has been receiving a good deal of national attention from media outlets, including the likes of Bloomberg (a five-part series of excerpts back in September/October), The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, the PBS Newshour (interview), the Daily Beast—and the list keeps growing. Woodard has become someone that news and political analysts want to talk to about the ideas and premise of his book. It also provides an analysis of said horse race that’s so much stronger than the standard political fare. For writer that I consider as having a strong regional orientation (New England, primarily), I’m thrilled that the rest of the country is discovering someone that we knew all along was a terrific writer.  I hope this national attention has people across the country picking the book up and giving it for gifts to their politically-oriented friends and family. Readers will find that Woodard’s done a real service with his ideas recommending that we reevaluate ideas on who we are as a nation and a people.

It’s been interesting to follow Woodard’s media “tour” the past few months, as well as read some of the comments from people that disagree with his assessment in American Nations. Our current digital orientation forces writers who’ve labored over their research and ideas for months and years to have to put up with the ubiquitous internet trolls, and other anonymous contrarians, displaying their remarkable ignorance and contempt for intelligence any time they weigh-in on any subject, although that never stops them from spraying their ignorance and even vitriol whenever they can back up to something worthwhile and lift their tails and let fly. I mean, it’s so much easier to take about 30 seconds to gather your accumulated stupidity and unleash it on an intelligent, nuanced writer like Woodard, who spent years researching and writing his book. Sadly, that’s what much of our public online dialogue has become.

Interestingly, a few of the more intelligent commenters have brought up a variety of ideas and themes that they try to use to counter Woodard’s work and research, like immigration, and in particular, our increased mobility as a nation. One theme, from a book that got some run a few years ago, including some public endorsement from former President Clinton, The Big Sort, made points and cited evidence that Americans are seeking out communities where others see the world the same way they do, mainly their worldview and values. To this argument, Woodard agrees, and extends it further to fit with his national premise; Americans are certainly “sorting” into like-minded configurations, but rather than it being limited by community, it is by like-minded nations.

There will always be exceptions—the Tea Party’s strength in places like Maine and even in New England (Woodard’s Yankeedom) during 2008 and the election of someone like Governor LePage. This would seem to run counter to the cultural view that our region is framed by an emphasis on education, local political control, and the pursuit of the greater good, even if it involves self-denial—traits defined by the radical Calvinists that  founded the region. To that, Woodard would probably say it’s important to take a longer view, which I’d tend to agree with.

As Woodard writes in his epilogue about the U.S., basing it upon his research and work in American Nations, “if Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like the current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The Union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate  rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions would withstand public scrutiny. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our won, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.  (pp. 318, American Nations).

****

Along with history and geography filtered through a cultural lens, I’ve been interested in energy issues, specifically, peak oil, for a number of years. For those unfamiliar with the term, peak oil is a label that describes the problem of energy resource depletion, or more specifically, the peak in global oil production. Given that oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, one that has powered phenomenal economic and population growth over the last century and a half, coming face-to-face with the decline in supplies threatens the entire economic pyramid that props up consumer capitalism across the world.

There is some misunderstanding about the term. Peak oil doesn’t mean we’re running out of oil, but that we are nearing the end of the era of cheap oil, as we segue from a buyers’ market to one benefiting sellers.  So, where are we on peak oil? Have we reached peak yet? There is no clear consensus, but many of the more credible experts believe at the moment is we are somewhere along the top of the Hubbert curve. Peak may have been achieved in 2006 or it might not happen until 2020 depending on economic growth. If there is a consensus in the peak oil community, most seem to feel that 2013 to 2015 will be the period when we’ll experience peak production of oil, globally.

Because the topic is one so fraught with emotion, I’m not going to argue for or against it here. What I am going to do is highlight another writer, like Woodard, who is looking at an issue with national implications, one that may very well determine what our future looks like in the United States. Interestingly, I think I can tie together both writer’s points and the premise of their books, which is what I’ll try to do at the end of this longer essay.

John Michael Greer is an intriguing writer, author, and a thinker with a wide range of interests, including peak oil, and what a future based on shortages of oil might mean for the west, including our own country. He also happens to be the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He also posts a weekly essay at his blog, The Archdruid Report that I’ve been eagerly anticipating since discovering his site and his writing a few months ago.

Because I read, and read widely, I think I’m open to ideas that exist outside the very narrow confines of what’s accepted. When you consider how tightly controlled information is in North America, and that most people now receive most of their information from sources that are often dubious, probably explains why it’s so difficult trying to move people out of their straitjacketed understanding on almost every national issue.

Greer’s weekly blog posts indicate that he’s an intriguing thinker, with a broad understanding of what I think ails America at this moment in time. When he wrote about the problem with “binary thinking,” it fit perfectly with what I see time and time again on every issue, and why I particularly enjoyed Woodard’s American Nations—it moved the discussion about politics and culture outside of a narrow, binary construct.

When I started on Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World, it was my 31^st book I’d read for the year. My goal had been 36 at the start of 2011, so I may end up a few books short come December 31^st. Still, reading 30 plus books of varying subject matter pushes me outside the kind of thinking that Greer touched on in the binary thinking piece. My choices rarely are found on the New York Times best seller lists for nonfiction, but they’re not necessarily obscure, either. They tend to have an academic orientation, but that’s not how I choose what I read. Basically, I’m intellectually curious and I don’t intend to have information spoon-fed to me. I make my selections based upon what I’m interested in learning about.

Greer’s book is rooted in ecology. For those of us that grew up in the 1970s, the word is very familiar and you may even remember the ecology flag of that time. Greer attempts to define the word in a way that pulls it outside of the cultural and political baggage that have been attached to the word. In its most basic sense, derived from the Greek words “oikos” meaning “home” and “logos,” or “speech,” Greer posits that ecology in its most basic definition is “speaking about the home.” In that context, ecology would be the scientific study of the relationship  between living beings and their environments. Central to ecological thought, then, would be the idea of connections. In the case of Greer’s book, he frames this to include our connections as humans to our ecosystem that we are all part of.

Greer explains the recent series of price spikes and crashes affecting energy, especially oil, through the lens of geology—he says that “the world has reached a point at which geology trumps market forces, and supply can no longer increase to meet the potential demand.” Not everyone will agree with Greer, namely someone like Daniel Yergin, who continues to be castigated as a “shill for the interests of big oil” by peak oil believers. Yergin vociferously denies peak oil and all the subsequent fallout that goes with that belief. The Wall Street Journal crowd predictably venerates Yergin and other peak oil deniers. It helps to keep people calm, meanwhile, every day, we’re moving towards a future that Greer and others warn we need to be preparing for. Time is of the essence, if you believe Greer, Jim Kunstler, and others that recognize that our era of happy motoring and energy abundance is coming to an end. You can read more about Yergin vs. the peak oil crowd in this evenhanded article at The Oil Drum.

In Greer’s first chapter of the book, “Beyond the Limits,” he addresses that period in our not-too-distant past (mainly the 1960s and early 1970s) when the awareness of the pressing issues of energy depletion were being considered, along with a number of other serious environmental concerns. He cites Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and how, in 1964, when it was first released, the outcry and accusations of it being crackpot pseudoscience were common among the mainstream gatekeepers of information, like the media. When our rivers in the U.S. (including the local Androscoggin) became so clogged by industrial waste that they caught fire in the early 1970s, Carson’s premise became hard to deny.

That and escalating oil costs tied to political issues (the oil embargo) brought an awareness of energy issues that put them front and center for every American. This became a period that could have changed the way that we used energy. There was an openness coming from consumers for energy solutions that could have included renewables. Conservation campaigns cut energy use dramatically—Greer notes that petroleum consumption dropped by 15 percent between 1975 and 1985. This placed downward pressure on costs. New discoveries from Alaska’s North Slope and the North Sea in Great Britain added additional oil to a saturated market.

The price of oil crashed and with oil trading at $10 a barrel, the impetus to conserve and find alternatives lost advocates and was no longer sexy. Alternative sources could not compete with cheap oil and lost ground and market share. Moving away from oil no longer was a viable political position to hold and conservative politicians (most notably Ronald Reagan) gained traction by insisting that liberals’ insistence on conservation and other changes weren’t necessary—nobody should have to make sacrifices.

Greer argues that if the move to a new energy economy had been made during the 1970s, during a period of surplus fossil fuels, then we might have made the transition and be better for it 35 years later. Instead, we pissed away our surplus by replacing energy-efficient vehicles with SUVs and vehicles like the Hummer, which originally was a military assault vehicle. It came to stand as a symbol for this age of excess and a throwaway economy.

Greer writes, “In hindsight, the entire period from 1980 to 2005 will likely be seen as one of history’s supreme blind alleys. For a quarter of a century or so, people across the industrial world consumed energy as thought there was no tomorrow. The problem with that way of living, of course, is that tomorrow comes anyway. The economic convulsions and energy shortages shaking the world today are serving notice of that unwelcome reality. The lesson these troubles bring home is that the economic arrangements, the infrastructure and the personal and collective habits that grew up in response to the misplace faith in perpetual abundance make no sense in a world subject to ecological limits.”

For the rest of the book, Greer makes a strong case for the demise of industrial society. He lays out how we are an ecosystem, subject to the very same rules as all other living communities. These systems follow trajectories of change over which we have no control. Our superior intelligence (I’d argue against this), or technologies, our military might—none of these matter and won’t alter the trajectory and decline. That’s what we are—an empire in decline. It’s a theme others have certainly addressed.

Greer brings an evenhanded style to a subject that could be apocalyptic in the hands of some writers, and depressing in the hands of many others. Instead, his very matter-of-fact presentation had me as a reader recognizing that now is the time to begin thinking, but more important, acting to prepare for the inevitable demise of our current way of life, whenever it comes. I’d even go so far as to say his approach borders on hopeful, but that might be a stretch for many.

I think the myth of perpetual progress has been embraced by so many in the U.S. that it’s become part of our national DNA. Now, in an empire that’s looking at its better days in the rearview mirror, it’s hard for most of its citizens to consider anything else, and face the reality of our situation. Like Greer, I believe the next few decades are going to be painful as we come face-to-face with the recognition that we might have mitigated our coming energy disaster and instead, foolishly wasted so many resources rather than making preparations.

What so most Americans remain in the dark about, in part because they refuse to heed the signs and the literature about the coming collapse, is that there are clear examples of where empires have faltered and ultimately failed within our lifetimes. The former Soviet Union is a very good example of what can happen and the stages of an empire as it enters and completes the stages of decline.

As Greer indicates toward the end of his book (page 229), the Hegelian orientation towards historicism in this country is pervasive.  He writes, “When peak oil comes up for discussion outside the activist community, one of the most common responses is, ‘Oh, they’ll think of something.” The belief is that in the past, when the world was about to run out of some resource, or need a big solution, they found something new. Often, the space program is held up as an example, or our ramp up of production for WWII. With historicism, “history’s arrow points in the direction of progress, and so whatever happens, the result will be more progress.”

I heartily recommend Greer’s book to anyone that’s familiar with peak oil and wants to have a better handle on how to begin taking steps to prepare. What I find particularly helpful in his book, as well as the writing that he’s doing via his blog, is that he lays out things rationally, without a lot of histrionics. Unlike someone like say, Kunstler, his writing is for the most part free of finger-pointing and an overriding sense of creating fear for fear’s sake. I like Kunstler, but I’ve found Greer to be someone that fits my own perspective as someone that believes in heeding the signs and taking small steps now, so that when the more difficult times come, I at least have made preparation and won’t be caught unawares.

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It might seem a bit odd to juxtapose Woodard’s American Nations and Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future. One is a work of history, geography, and arguably, politics. The other is steeped in ecology and offers a view of the future that’s less than rosy. Actually, however, they aren’t as disparate as they appear.

I first became interested in considerations about what locations might be best for living, in thinking about a future when cheap oil was no longer a luxury. It was in fact Kunstler’s The Long Emergency that got me thinking in those terms when I read it back in 2006. While he continues to be one of the prophets of doom many love to hate, much of what he’s written is prescient, and I think that will be more evident as we move along the timeline to the period when energy resources become scarce.

He wrote in The Long Emergency that small cities surrounded by productive farmland offer the best chance for survival, and even some measure of “comfort,” which is what Greer is trying to lay out in his book. To Kunstler’s way of thinking, the south is the absolute worst place to be, as air conditioning, the advent of, led to an economic prosperity that the region lacked prior. Places like Tuscon and Phoenix are cities to leave right now if you can. They require excessive energy to live (due to the needs of air conditioning predicated by the excessive heat), plus there’s little in the way of productive farmland. The south, generally, is still very tribal, according to Kunstler. Woodard’s book lends a real cultural understanding to what I remember from The Long Emergency, and I hearkened back to some of Kunstler’s themes when I was reading portions of American Nations.

Woodard writes that The Deep South (one of his 11 rival regional cultures) was “militarized, caste-structured, and deferential to authority. Much of that cultural mindset still seems intact, especially in light or the current Dixie bloc, which fuels our current culture wars. Kunstler was less kind towards what he derisively calls “the land of NASCAR” when referring to the South.

Both Kunstler and Woodard would probably agree that New England, Yankeedom in Woodard’s nomenclature, is a place that just might be able to weather and find a way to cope in a world where energy availability is at a premium.

It’s been my experience that the residents of Yankeedom still have neighborliness and a sense of mutual aid in their DNA. When bad things happen, they don’t steal and loot from one another, but offer help and support. Think of the Ice Storm of ’98 as an example. Our communities in Northern New England have ample farmland near many smaller cities. Over the past ten years, there has been a push towards local farming that bodes well, regardless of what the future holds. Even if peak oil is decades away, economic conditions seem to be telling us that local and regional is better than global solutions. The days of the “3,000 mile Caesar Salad” and shipping organic produce from Oregon to Maine isn’t a sustainable practice. It’s rooted in a culture of excess that we can no longer afford on many levels.

Having read Kunstler, Woodard’s book, placed alongside Greer’s treatise seems to endorse what Kunstler called “the old Union” as possible places that can weather a world, post-peak oil. The regions of Yankeedom, New France, The Midlands, and probably First Nation, in Canada are places where the characteristics necessary for a world that’s more intentional, more hands-on (raising your own food), and where a pre-industrial model might set up and prove workable seem to make sense in the context of Woodard’s regional breakdown.

I’m glad I’ve committed the hours I have over the past year reading writers like Colin Woodard, John Michael Greer, and others, along with the likes of Kunstler, Morris Berman, Neil Postman, Barbara Ehrenreich (and a host of others) in the past. The knowledge and understanding I now possess helps me ward off the bullshit that’s perpetrated by corporate media, and has inoculated me to the misinformation and false sense of security foisted on most others by the myths of a society set up to fail in the coming decades of scarce energy resources.

It’s now down to a roll of the dice. Continuing to believe in perpetual progress, or educating yourself, and making preparations for a place radically different than what we’ve experienced up to now. The choice is yours.