Television coverage is driven by images.

Dramatic pictures almost write their own stories. When the telegenic scenes pass so does much of the coverage.

So the moments when the television audience watched as Hurricane (and later Tropical Storm) Irene bore down on the American coastline were news. Pictures of intrepid (or if you prefer silly) reporters standing out in the driving rain popped up across the channels.

Then the storm was over. The television audience, watching Irene the way they watch NASCAR (in other words, secretly hoping to be able to see tragedy from the comfort of their living rooms) lost interest when nothing spectacular happened and decided that the storm had been overhyped.

Nothing to see there. Move along.

Except Irene hasn\’t finished hurting people. There are people who still have no power. There are communities isolated by the destruction of roads and bridges. People who worked and saved all their lives have lost their homes, their businesses and their jobs.

As the headline writers at Salon.com put it Hurricane Irene is working-class disaster for NC and Irene\’s flooding threatens Vermont\’s leaf season. At a moment in American history that working class and middle class have been disappearing Irene has damaged job generating areas of the country. At a time when governments are struggling just to maintain existing infrastructure Irene has destroyed crumbling roads and washed away old bridges. How will cash poor local governments raise the money to replace and rebuild?

Irene may not have made a direct hit on New York City but she did land a massive blow on the working and middles classes along the east coast of the United States.

Yesterday we went grocery shopping.

Since Monday is Labour Day and Tuesday is the first day of school in our community the stores were full of families stocking up for the weekend\’s picnics and barbecues and buying back-to-school supplies.

We are both on medically restricted diets so we take shopping for food very, very seriously and are far more restricted as to our choices than were most of the people in the stores. Yet as I stood at the check-outs at the various stores I can to the realization that we were probably going to spend less on food for the next week than most of the families around us.

Why?

We always have a list so we are well organized. Neither of us is fond of sweets and neither of us is allowed to eat many of the foods that stores place at the end of aisles and at the check-outs just to tempt you.

But that isn\’t enough to explain why our grocery bill is relatively inexpensive since, after all, the same food restrictions that save us at the check-out also means that we often have fewer choices and can less often substitute the food we can planned to buy with \”store specials.\”

We spend less to eat because we have the privilege of not being poor.

To unpack it:
We have a car.
Our time is our own.
We don\’t have to shop with children.[1]
We both enjoy doing math in our heads.
We never have to shop when we are tired.
We don\’t have to shop when we are hungry.
We can afford to stock up on things that are on sale.
We have a comfortable kitchen in which to cook.
We have each other company to help us shop, cook and clean.

And, once again, we have time.

We live no more than a 20 minute drive from the most distant store, there were two of us and it took more than 4 hours for us to shop just for groceries.

If we had shopped more quickly it would have cost us more. (How long are you willing to take comparing every single type of spatula in a big box store? We probably took 10 minutes. There was a 3 dollar difference between the lowest priced and highest priced acceptable spatula. We bought two. How long are you willing to take comparing every single brand of orange juice? You cannot just assume that the store brand will always be cheaper. Nor can you assume that just because that brand of crackers was cheapest last time the same will be true this week.)

Because we have the privilege of time, a car, no child care, and little stress we end up paying less than the people who most need to save those few dollars so that they can be spent on something else that is desperately needed.

The privilege of being (comparatively) well off makes it easier for us to continue to be (comparatively) well off. The costs of being poor ensure that it is harder for people to save enough money to get out of poverty.

In other words, in addition to all the other costs in their lives, the poor pay an additional poverty tax on their already stretched funds.

Or, as Sir Terry Pratchett put it The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

[1] In case you haven\’t noticed stores place items that children will be attracted to at child eye level. As far as I am concerned, in one of the circles of hell parents are forced to endlessly wheel grocery carts up and down crowded aisles with a least one child in the cart and another trailing behind them as both children cry out \”but why can\’t I have it\” as the cart goes by endless shelves stocked with toys and candy that the parents can\’t afford to buy.

 

The NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen attended the International Conference on Libya in Paris on 1 September 2011. [picture and text from http://www.nato.int]

Last night I picked up Dorothy L. Sayers\’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, a Lord Peter Wimsey novel that I last read decades ago. Because it is a book I have read before the scenes and characters are familiar yet due to the years that have passed since that last reading some of the details felt quite fresh to me.

This morning I woke up with a mental \”itch.\” What was it about the early chapters of the book that had bothered me? I couldn\’t quite put my mental fingers on it but I knew something was there.

Then, this afternoon, I got it.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club does not just begin on Armistice Day in the late 1920s. The opening chapters are suffused with allusions to and memories of the Great War. The scene is a gentlemen\’s club in London and the members of that club, members of the social elite of the time in London, were if anything more likely to have served in the war than would the average man on the street. Wimsey himself was in the military during (what we refer to as) WWI rising to the rank of Major. Wimsey was injured before the end of the war and was one of the many soldiers who suffered from shell shock. The first person Wimsey talks to after entering the club (George Fentiman) is another veteran of WWI and a fellow sufferer from shell shock. Wimsey has arrived at the club in order to meet with a Colonel who puts on a dinner for his late son\’s friends every Armistice Day. The son had been killed in action during the war.

Fentiman\’s brother also served in the Great War and at the time book opens was still in the military. Fentiman\’s grandfather was a General (having served in the Crimean War.) When a dead body is found at the gentleman\’s club the doctor who arrived on the scene (also a club member) had been an Army surgeon during the war. Wimsey met his valet (and assistant in detection) Bunter during the war when Bunter was a Sergeant.

The Great War cast many shadows over the years between the Armistice in 1918 and the beginning of WWII. The servant \”problem\” grew larger as men (and women) who found jobs in the military and in factories during the war decided not to go back to the villages their families had lived in for generations. Men whose fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers had worked the land or been in service had been taught skills and given a glimpse of a life in which one was not expected to be \”at the ready\” twenty-four hours a day. The ratio of men to women in Britain and Europe was altered by the war and a generation of women faced the reduced likelihood that they would ever marry. Fewer of the women in the workforce were only there until they got married and had children.

The fact that members of one\’s own family might be the people who are put on the front line of fighting does not make pacifists of politicians. One needs only to look at the history of the British Empire to know that. But one does wonder how much it alters things when the people who decide who goes to war (and how well equipped the troops are, and how well they will be treated when they return home, and if they have adequate pensions) know that the chances that they or someone about whom they care deeply will be on the front lines are vanishingly small. One wonders if the people who vote those politicians into (and out of) office would make the same decision in the voting booth if their support for the troops required more personal effort than putting a decal on their car.

Today the sons, daughters, cousins, mothers and fathers we send into battle are rarely people we know. Their families are rarely people we will ever have to speak to. For most of us war, fighting, death, shell shock, injury and trauma have become just another thing to be outsourced.

The thing about being in a foreign is the way in which the strangest things will trip you up. You are prepared to find that most of the people in Turkey speak Turkish but you may be set aback when you excuse yourself from the dinner table to visit the toilet in your host\’s home and find that the facilities look rather different than you had expected.[1]

Similarly when one reads books written in fifty or one hundred years ago one expects that gender expectations, indeed the very performances of gender, would differ from those of the present day. If one is at all familiar with the past (or the history of the women\’s movement) one is not taken aback to learn that women did not have the vote in England in 1914 or that most women in the 1890s did not routinely go to college.

What trips one up is that these changes did not take place in a lockstep fashion. Women did not get the right to vote, go to university, live on their own, open their own bank accounts, sit on juries and hold public office all at the same time. So one will come across rather remarkable scenes such as this one from Barbara Pym\’s book Excellent Women[2] (the narrative voice is that of Mildred Lathbury, the book\’s protagonist. The book is set in the early 1950s. Lathbury is what would once have been called \”a gentlewoman\”, unmarried, living alone in London after the death of her parents. She worked for the government during the war and now has a job working with \”distressed gentlewomen.\” Earlier in the book she met Everard Bone through mutual acquaintances. She and Bone are, at most, vaguely friends. One day Lathbury receives a telephone call from Bone:

\’I rang up to ask if you would come and have dinner with me in my flat this evening. I have got some meat to cook.\’
I saw myself putting a small joint into the oven and preparing vegetables. I could feel my aching back bending over the sink. (p. 284)

My initial response as a reader is to wonder why Lathbury jumped to the (in my mind unwarranted) assumption that Bone was expecting Lathbury to cook the dinner to which he had invited her but it is soon made clear that she is correct in her assumption.

\’I\’m sorry about the meat,\’ I said, \’trying to infuse life into our now nearly dead conversation.
\’Why should you be sorry about it?\’
\’Do you know how to cook it?\’
\’Well, I have a cookery book.\’
……….
I had not wanted to see Everard Bone and the idea of having to cook his evening meal for him was more than I could bear at this moment. (p. 285)

Throughout the book Pym (through Lathbury) highlights the degree to which men expect things to simply be done. For women of the class of Lathbury this creates a particular problem since the changing economic structure of English life has changed the ubiquity of servants. Just a few decades earlier men of Bone\’s class and education would have someone who \”did\” things for them. They might not have been able to afford a live-in servant but they would not be doing the cooking and cleaning themselves. From my reading of novels set in the 1920s and 1930s many of these men lived in buildings that had a staff that provided meals and similar circumstances. Now such buildings were beyond the financial reach of many of those who might have lived in them before and servants were no longer plentiful and cheap. What was a gentleman to do? Apparently such men, robbed of servants, turned to the nearest gentlewoman to solve the problem.

One imagines that if one had even brought this matter to the attention of a man such as Bone he would have been perplexed as to why it was a problem. \”After all,\” I can imagine Bone saying, \”Mildred would have to cook her own dinner anyway. The only difference is now two of us can eat what she cooks.\” The idea of the reverse (Lathbury calling him to suggest that he come over to cook her dinner) is one thinks, beyond his imagination.

And yet, things are changing. The couple through whom Bone and Lathbury met do not live out the normal gender roles. She is an anthropologist and he is a retired Naval officer. He likes to cook and she refuses to learn to do so well. They do not see themselves as revolutionary and yet their very refusal to do so is perhaps the most transgressive thing about their marriage.

For readers who are interesting in the \”facts on the ground\” of the way in which gender expectation and performance have changed over the last century reading books such as Excellent Women is the literary equivalent of an anthropologist\’s field trip.

[1] This example was inspired by an episode of House Hunters International. I was baffled the a woman who was planning to buy a house in Istanbul and move permanently to Turkey should be so taken aback at the sight of a perfectly clean squat toilet. She didn\’t say that she wanted an American style toilet, she took one look at it an exclaimed in horror \”what is that!\”

\”That\”, I said back to the television set, \”is an indication that you are a typical drive-by Westerner who thinks they know a lot about a country because they like visiting it as a tourist or when staying with friends. I bet she doesn\’t even carry her own toilet paper with her.

[2] Pym, Barbara. Excellent women. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall, 1985.

Tell me what is \”wrong\” with the second paragraph of this quote from What\’s fueling Bible Belt divorces:

Southern men and women had higher rates of divorce in 2009 than their counterparts in other parts of the country: 10.2 per 1,000 for men and 11.1 per 1,000 for women, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday.

By comparison, men and women in the Northeast had the lowest rates of divorce, 7.2 and 7.5 per 1,000, which is also lower than the national divorce rate of 9.2 for men and 9.7 for women.

Did the writer(s) and editor(s) of this piece not realize that the \”national divorce rate\” means \”the average rate of divorce\”? And did they not realize the lowest number of those being averaged must, unless the numbers being averaged are all of an equal value, by definition be lower than average?

This mistake does not negate the observations made in these opening paragraphs–that the divorce rates in the South are not only higher than those in the Northeast they are higher than the national divorce rate. But it does lead this reader to wonder how well those involved understood the data made available by the U.S. Census Bureau. How well would they be able to understand the simplest of statistical analyses of the data made available?

It also gives me some clue as to why so many Americans find it almost impossible to make reasoned judgements about matters of science. Not only do people who are scientifically illiterate and mathematically innumerate do the gatekeeping and the reporting of scientific news the years of reading such reports results in a systemic deskilling of many of people reading them.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

There are books that one can rate, summarize and review as soon as one reaches the last word of the last line. There are others that positively demand to be reread before one does so.

This is one of those books.

To start with \”the bottom line\” – I enjoyed this book very much. After my first reading I gave it a preliminary rating of 4-1/2 stars. I knew it was good, I knew I enjoyed it and yet I wasn\’t quite ready and able to explain why.

So I gave it a little rest (48 hours) and picked it up again.

Now, after reading it a second time I have decided that it rates a full 5 stars. I still don\’t feel that I can adequately explain all the reasons I found it to be excellent or capture all the thoughts reading it sparked.

I need to read it at least one more time so before sitting down to type this preliminary review I ordered a copy of my own so I can return the one I have to the library.

Why did I so enjoy this book? First of all, Pym\’s writing style was unobtrusively pleasant. It vaguely evokes the feeling of Austen without reading like a pastiche. Pym\’s voice is not the voice of Austen but one does feel a similarity of taste and tone between the two.

The plot of Excellent Women is at the same time like all of Austen\’s books and none of them. The protagonist (the \”voice\” of the book), Mildred Lathbury, is an unmarried woman in her early thirties who lives on a small income after the death of her parents. She is, like so many of Austen\’s heroines, a gentlewoman of modest means. Lathbury herself notices that though she lives in London her life is very much as it was when she lived in a more rural setting. Most of her interactions are with a rather circumscribed number of people. Gossip, cooking, cleaning, visiting with others, planning church events and shopping fills her life and the lives of many of those around her.

In many ways the world in which Lathbury lives would be familiar to Austen and yet in some crucial ways it is very different. While those around Lathbury may gossip about her \”opportunities\” and presume that she would accept a proposal from the appropriate man she herself shows little urgency, let alone desire, to marry. She is wryly aware of her attraction to some of the men she meets but these are mild and passing feelings. She is aware of the woeful financial circumstances of some members of her own class (in fact her job involves working with distressed gentlewomen) and is aware that some day she may find herself in a similar circumstance. These financial realities do not seem to have an impact on her interactions with men.

Unlike the unmarried daughters of deceased clergymen in Austen\’s day Lathbury and her contemporaries feel no shame at holding down jobs. They may, like Lathbury\’s friend Dora, work as teachers, but they are not reduced to being governesses tucked away in cold and badly lit attics. They can travel freely, they can have male friends and they can even, if they so choose, have careers.

What Pym highlights in this book is the state of male/female relationships at a pivotal moment in time. Men still assume that they will be looked after (a point about which Lathbury has frequent wry thoughts) but they have lost much of their authority and power and seem for the most part of have retained their privileges through societal inertia rather than through any efforts of their own. Pym (through Lathbury) observes English life as the changes in class structure and male/female dynamics begins to unfold.

For any reader who has wondered after finishing Sense and Sensibility \”what would happen to Elinor and Marianne today\” Excellent Women is an excellent answer.

Rating: 5 stars

Reading through The New York Times today I cam across this article, New Mortgage Limit May Set Buyers Back and my first thought was that, yet again, some change in American banking/foreclosure/credit ratings was going to disadvantage millions of Americans.

I was wrong.

This article, though published in the middle of times of severe economic constraint, is not about buyers it is about a very particular group of buyers who will be effected by the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) dropping the maximum amount they will insure from $729,650 to $625,500.

Yes, house prices are higher in Manhatten than in many other parts of the country — but the (estimated 2009) median household income in New York City was just over $50,000. That means (given the advise from a variety of financial advisers) that half of all the households in New York City cannot afford to buy a home that costs more than $150,000. Even if we look only at Manhatten and consider the mean household income the average family cannot afford a mortgage much larger than $360,000.

It is mentioned one than once in the body of the article that this change in the FHA insurance ceiling will only affect those looking for homes costing between three-quarters of a million and a million dollars.

Three things stand out to this reader.

First, the tone of the article is that it would be a bad thing for sellers to have to lower the prices of their New York properties in order to find buyers. As a home owner (who saw hir own home lose value during an earlier economic recession) I understand what if feels like to see the value of an asset depreciate. But this is the nature of most investments–they can go down in value just as they can go up. \”Banking\” on one\’s house/apartment is a bad idea. It seems to me that the people who declaim loudly and often about the \”wisdom\” of the free market should be willing to accept the sad news that market is trying to give them–right now some of the housing units in New York City are overvalued.

Second, a someone whose first summer job as a teenager was with a mortgage company I find my shocked at the idea of someone in this economy even thinking of buying a house with a mere 3.5% downpayment. Do these potential homeowners have no savings? What will they do if one of them loses their job? What will happen if an unexpected pregnancy occurs? What will they do if their health insurance premiums go up? What happens if they run into unexpected maintenance costs? In other words, what happens when life happens? Many American families are only one or two paychecks away from losing their homes and being on the street and this holds true for families who are \”income rich/capital poor\” as well as for those who are struggling members of the working poor.

Third, articles like this are indications of why \”conventional wisdom\” and \”the talking heads\” never seem to know what the average American does and care about the things which worry the typical American. A substantial proportion of Americans today have no jobs. Not only do they have no jobs they have no realistic hope of ever having a reasonably paying job which allows them to use their skills fully. A substantial proportion of Americans who do have jobs are looking at pay freezes (at best) or pay cuts and the reduction of benefits. A sizable percentage of Americans who still have jobs are delaying their retirement.

Most of the householders in New York City are just worried about feeding their children and keeping a minimally acceptable roof over their heads. The \”wise heads\” at The New York Times should be writing articles about the problems of the ordinary New York City resident (the teacher, the nurse, the waitperson, the people who keep the city running) not about the challenges faced by those whom fortune has already favoured.

But the ordinary people are not the target audience of people who pay the bills at The New York Times and other major newspapers. In the democracy of the dollar zie who has the most dollars gets the most attention, the most respect, the most consideration and the most votes.

 

 

The way that Canadians have responded to the death of Jack Layton has struck me as – – very Canadian.

Jack….for that is what he liked to called….was never our Prime Minister. He was never a member of the federal cabinet. He was only the leader of the Official Opposition for a few short months.

He was given a state funeral. He lay in state first in Ottawa and then in Toronto.

His funeral was held in Roy Thomson Hall. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed. Richard Underhill of The Shuffle Demons played a haunting rendition of Into the Mystic.

The first blessing at the funeral was given by Shawn Atleo (national chief of the Assembly of First Nations) in an aboriginal language. He concluded that blessing by giving a white eagle feather to Olivia Chow (Jack\’s widow.)

Rev. Brent Hawkes, explained that he was wearing his academic gown to officiate at the funeral in order not to give precedence to any one religion. Later on in the service Hawkes made reference to his own husband, John.

There were readings from the Bible. There was a reading from the
Qu’ran.

Stephen Lewis gave a rousing eulogy that spoke often about the causes that were most important to Jack (aids, gay rights, violence against women, homelessness). Lewis reminded the audience that Jack\’s last letter to Canadians was a manifesto for social democracy.

Steve Page (of Barenaked Ladies) sang Leonard\’s Cohen\’s Hallelujah.
Martin Deschamps (soloist and lead singer of Offenbach) with Bernard Quessy performed Croire.
Lorraine Segato (Parachute Club) performed Rise Up
Julie Michels and the Choir of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto performed Chet Powers\’ Get Together

The funeral is available on demand from the CBC website.

Today I am feeling very Canadian. We are geographically large and numerically small country. We are a people of many languages, religions and belief systems. We break into applause at the rallying cry \”for social justice.\”

Today I feel I am a citizen of no mean country.

Women \”of a certain\” age often find it frustrating to talk to women who are much younger about the subject of feminism and women\’s rights.

This is, in part, due to the fact that the women\’s rights/feminism movement lost the battle to frame the issue. Being a feminist became synonymous with \”man hating\” and \”lesbian.\” Leaving aside the question as to what exactly is wrong with being a lesbian one could spend a hour (or a day or a year) discussing the strange lack of equivalence between \”man-hating\” and \”misogyny\”. In general the critical and popular press in United States treats misogyny as an unfortunate (and perhaps sympathetic/understandable) shortcoming in an individual. Misogynist statements/actions by men who are otherwise considered admirable, interesting, talented and/or entertaining are treated much like evidence that the man in question suffers from questionable hygiene or has been known to spit or urinate in public. Note that his woman hating opinions/statements will be characterized as misogynist, thus removing their visceral impact.

The same critical and popular press treats indications that a woman may be, as they phrase it a \”man-hater\” as reason to call into question all of her other statements, actions and opinions. Note that the woman\’s opinions/statements will be characterized as man hating rather than misandrist thus heightening any visceral impact. Any indication of \”man-hating\” in a woman of otherwise sterling intellectual achievements will be used to undermine and question the validity of all her other statement or opinions no matter how unrelated they may be.

To put it another way; a man has certain opinions and is a misogynist while a women has certain opinions because she is a man hater. Misogyny in a man is like lefthandedness or a weakness for the early movies of John Wayne–only worth remarking upon if they are directly relevant to the subject at hand. \”Man-hating\” in a woman is evidence of inability to manage anger/emotions that calls into question her ability to make reasoned judgments about anything.