1 November 2004
Damn! Where the hell have I been, you ask? Stressing out about work, my column, the research article I’m writing for Michael Pollan’s class, money issues, you know… I need to post links to my latest columns, but in the meantime, here’s a dispatch from Kansas City, MO.
Kansas City, MO – No, I didn’t bring Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation to read at B.B.’s Lawnside Bar-B-Q. But the book was certainly on my mind. I was going to write a polemic on the relationship between vegetarianism and one’s views on abortion, but I realized that these abstract philosophical arguments–which I’ve often been accused of relishing–will mean nothing as my senses are immersed in the two things Kansas City is best known for: barbecue and the blues.
B.B.’s Lawnside Bar-B-Q sits off Troost Road, a long, straight shot south from Kansas City that passes countless fountains, limestone houses, furniture stores, and bail bonds offices. Tonight’s performers were the regular Sunday band, Lee !McBee and the Confessors, a suitable enough replacement for missing Mass. A woman in a black top hat–it’s Halloween and we’re masquerading as Kerry supporters–informs us that there’s a cover tonight: $3. That’s nothing compared to the $10 or more one pays at many San Francisco establishments, so we’re all too happy to step out of the rain, which, if it continues on to Tuesday, promises to swing undecided voters against the incumbent. It may not make a difference in Dick Gephardt’s home state, but we’ll take all the help we can get.
My host, a New Mexican of Bolivian origin and a recent transplant from San Francisco, has been telling us about how he feels uncomfortable being constantly asked where he’s from, as if no one around here has met a Latino who wasn’t working in the kitchen. But inside B.B.’s, people just come to eat good ribs and listen to the harmonica wailing about some lost love. I’m reminded of Harry Connick, Jr.’s creative reinterpretation of “Basin Street Blues”: Basin Street is the street / Where all the white and the black folk meet / Down in New Orleans…
Eating at B.B.’s is like being invited to a never-ending family picnic. The long tables are covered with generic red and white gingham tablecloths, and everyone gets a styrofoam plate. Food arrives in plastic baskets on a layer of wax paper, presumably to keep the grease from leaking through. The only side dishes with any greenness are cole slaw and green beans; luckily, I remembered to bring my multivitamins on this trip. I order a Pabst Blue Ribbon only to realize the double irony that would be a hipster’s undoing: in Kansas City, it’s not ironic to order a PBR.
The menu includes the obligatory homage to Crescent City cuisine–blackened catfish, jambalaya, gumbo, rice and beans with ham hocks–but the real specialties of the house are the ribs and the pulled pork. I order the B.B. King Combo Platter, which includes both of these along with another porcine incarnation, the Italian sausage, making for an unholy trinity of pork. After having read The Jungle I think twice about eating the sausage, but in the end, the limited amount of room in my stomach allows me to feel less guilty about not finishing it.
The ribs and pulled pork–both succulent, tender, and juicy, and perfect for experimentation with an array of five different hot sauces–reveal, when eaten, a slice of white bread. I never appreciated white bread until I had eaten a pile of greasy, spicy pork and battered fries and needed something with a soft texture and no flavor at all to cleanse the palate by way of preparation for the next onslaught–this bread, a step up from Wonder Bread, does the trick nicely.
White bread with barbecue is also an appropriate metaphor for the juxtaposition of cultures in Kansas City. Kansas City bestrides the Kansas-Missouri border; Jackson County, on the Missouri side, is perceived as the side with more people of color, while Johnson County, on the Kansas side, was the destination for “white flight.” But here at B.B.’s, the lines dissolve. Lee !McBee introduces Justin Arbuckle, a nicely groomed gentleman wearing a blue button-down shirt and khakis, and I think to myself, “There’s no way this guy can sing the blues.” Yet he belts out his song with the same passion as the customers attacking their ribs, and everyone in the house, whether from Jackson or Johnson or Alameda County, applauds him wildly.
As I sit staring at the pile of bones, wondering if the ambient cigarette smoke will cause my arteries, already shrunken to pinholes, to constrict one last little bit, I wonder if I could really enjoy this culture of music and food without partaking of barbecue. Meat is not only a choice we make; it’s an ingrained part of different peoples’ heritages. Pig roasts are a common cause for celebration across many societies, from the Chinese recipe, sweetened and reddened by honey and sherry, to the Filipino lechon served with liver sauce, to the Cajun boucherie. (Incidentally, all three of these traditions are united through my girlfriend and I; we intend to have a boucherie at our wedding.)
To get back to the philosophical, I find it hard to disagree with Peter Singer’s premise that nonhuman animals can suffer as humans do, and we should thus avoid causing them suffering when possible. But Singer leaves open the possibility of ethically eating meat raised and killed in a humane way; if this means I can only have Niman Ranch, or that I have to pay significantly more for my meat, I can accept that. I certainly can’t eat like this every day, or even every week. But to castigate meat-eating as irredeemably hedonistic and selfish is to deny a central part of many human cultures. The Chinese character for “home” or “family” is a pictogram showing a roof above a pig, as Chinese families use pigs to turn garbage into high-quality protein. Could we really hope to excise the pig from Chinese culture any more than we could remove it from the Chinese language? The gaping hole left in that culture, which one couldn’t even call Chinese, would be like the blues without barbecue.
22 September 2004
Apparently George W. Bush doesn’t get such “darn good intelligence” after all.
Here’s my latest column, “Sharia Don’t Like It.”
The title comes from “Rock the Casbah” by The Clash, one of the songs that was forbidden from being played on the radio shortly after 9/11.
The real lyric goes, The sharif don’t like it (doo-doo-do) / Rockin’ the casbah, rock the casbah. It’s supposed to be about a fundamentalist Islamic monarch who cracks down on funky dance music by ordering (no doubt American-made) jets to bomb the casbah.
I always thought the lyric really was, “Sharia don’t like it” because that made perfect sense to me, being a snooty intellectual who knows what sharia is.
Ah well, this time it isn’t even ironic.
9 September 2004
The Colossus is now up and ready for comments, criticism, and mockery.
A friend made this image of Bush, constructed out of the faces of the 1000 soldiers who have died in Iraq.
2 September 2004
Sorry I haven’t been writing in awhile. I’ve been focusing on The Colossus. I also wrote my first column of the semester for the Daily Cal.
It’s very strange; no longer satisfied with reporting news the instant after it occurs, the media has now taken to reporting news that will happen in the future. I looked at the New York Times website a few minutes before 4:00 PM today. The headlines were:
- “Bush Will Appeal to Nation to Help Him Build a ‘Safer World’”
- “Jobless Figures on Friday Could Emphasize Bush’s Big Weakness”
The first headline is reported on an almost absolute certainty that Bush’s speech will contain that theme. Either some reporter has a deep source, or he or she just showed up for Bush’s rehearsal at Madison Square Gardens. But way to go, David Stout; you certainly beat the pack on that one.
The second headline is a “preemptive news analysis.” Rather than wait for the event itself (whose occurrence is certain even as outcome is not), the Times is betting that the jobs report will come up short, pummeling Bush on what it preordains his “big weakness.”
One day, computers will be able to predict the most likely headlines for the next day based on the word content of today’s stories. It’s not a big jump from “Jobless Figures on Friday Could Emphasize Bush’s Big Weakness” to “Bush’s Poll Numbers Could Drop Because of Economy, Iraq” to “Bush Set to Narrowly Lose Election” to “Kerry Anticipates Change After Inauguration” to “Hundreds of Thousands Still Dying in Sudan Genocide.”
11 August 2004
William Saletan has an column in Slate about Kerry’s effective use of the stem cell debate as a wedge issue to win over independents and Republicans. He rightly points out that there is no ban on stem cell research, as Kerry claims in nicely packaged soundbites, but only a ban on federal support of stem cell research.
The real issue, Saletan continues, is that science is becoming as ideological as religion. Richard Lewontin made a similar point in his book Biology as Ideology, referring to the oversell of the Human Genome Project as a panacea for all that ails humankind.
The underlying question is, what is the ultimate goal of biomedical research? No one can dispute that relieving needless pain and suffering is an obvious good. But is there a secret undercurrent of hope for what amounts to physical immortality? As science conquered infectious diseases – at least for the First World – allowing greater lifespans and therefore productivity, biomedical research turned toward cancer, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease – diseases of the long-lived, who, not coincidentally, are also the most prosperous. And after that, what next? Shall we cure aging itself?
10 August 2004
Three of the eco-anarchists stayed at my house again last night. They reported that the Black & Green Gathering was “disorganized,” hardly a surprise considering that it was run by anarchists.
They had some interesting stories, of perverts running sexual healing workshops; of hundreds of hippies showing up at lunch looking for pot, then moving on to the nearby Rainbow Gathering; of a horrorcore band singing “Who Has Died Here?” (or as was misinterpreted, “Who Has Dyed Hair?”) through all hours of the night; of a suspected police infiltrator caught with duplicate sets of notes containing names, quotes, and speculations as to future illegal activity; of escorting the infiltrator out of the forest, and the possibility that he was just a foil to either get the anarchists paranoid and less cooperative, or more complacent and vulnerable to other, more competent infiltrators; of hostility toward leftists & progressives, which the eco-anarchists consider themselves.
At least these anarchists are engaged in the philosophy and action of their lifestyle. I don’t know how many Telegraph Ave. punks are anarchists by form only.
26 July 2004
Five anarchists are staying in my living room for the week. They’re not the Molotov-throwing kind, I think – at least I haven’t seen them in black masks yet – they’re the eco-anarchist type.
Our guests are on their way to the Black & Green Gathering in Oregon. One of them left a copy of “Green Anarchy” on the dining room table. While the sentiments expressed within are very clearly focused against particular institutions (specifically genetically-modified organisms), the style of writing is unsettlingly like that of Lyndon LaRouche’s writings; that is to say, certain things are assumed to be bad; certain words are so often associated with an unexplained quality of “badness” that rational readers are left wondering whether we are supposed to be upset at the words or at the ill-defined concept the word represents; and the whole thing is circuitous, self-referential, and obfuscatory.
I have no problem with individuals returning to the wild, living “off the grid,” or just reducing one’s ecological footprint. But I am caught between two extremes: the Cheney-esque vision of conservation as “personal virtue” – wholly ineffective as a societal plan – and the eco-anarchist vision of destroying civilization as we know it to return everyone to the wild. To return 6 billion humans to the wild, though, you would have to kill off 5.9 billion of them. To support 6 billion humans, even in what for most of them is relative squalor, requires modern technology.
And even if you did return a few lucky lottery winners to a wilderness sterilized of the trappings of modern civilization (an Act of such terrible enormity that neither Stalin nor Hitler ever envisioned, but whose closest practical adherents were the Khmer Rouge), human beings constantly aim to improve their local situation, through cooperation, trade, division of labor, and technology, whose development is only made possible by the previous three. There is indeed a directionality to human development, as Robert Wright so eloquently argues in his book NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
But as Wright himself suggests, it may be the case that this directionality has purpose, telos. Perhaps it would take all the oil and coal buried in the ground, the results of multiple world wars and atom bombs and the imminent clash of liberalism and reactionary fundamentalism, for humankind to design the best way to live peacefully and happily. War and death are inevitable as populations approach carrying capacity, and this is true not just of humans but of all natural life. But as rational beings, we have the capability, if not always the will, to use thought and technology (made possible today by the use of a whole lot of oil and coal) to choose a merciful solution, one that allows each of us to redeem our full potential while choosing a path consonant with nature – that is, within nature’s limitations.
And here we run into the problem of “values imposition.” Whereas the Right believes its family values so important – and so divinely infallible – as to require their imposition on even those who do not subscribe to the same God, the Left will have none of it, claiming that values are personal and relativistic, and thus not to be imposed on others. Yet the same Left proclaims jeremiads about global warming, the expiration of natural resources, the dangers of overpopulation, and then demands federal regulations and programs that will subject everyone to their worldview.
Clearly, the Left has empirical evidence to support its environmental values; but all the empirical evidence in the world will not convince people who do not value empirical evidence. Similarly, that one has an irrational, though deeply heartfelt, belief in God is of no use in rationally convincing an empiricist of God’s existence. So who is right? Whose values are important enough to impose by rule of law?
The obvious compromise – one that neither side will readily agree to – is to accept both sets of values. The alternative, default compromise, of course, is that we accept neither.
14 July 2004
Seems like everyone I know is undergoing conversion experiences. Well, that’s not quite true. Mostly it’s Dan and myself.
For me, being an agnostic–an intellectually more honest position than outright atheism, which requires just as much faith (read: seeing what one wants to believe) as theism–leaves open the possibility of a return to faith. As long as the mind is open and one has a yearning to be part of something larger than oneself, even the most skeptical mind will stumble upon universal truths again, even if one discarded them in one’s rebellious youth.
That’s my problem with the “atheist-but-spiritual” philosophy. People who subscribe to this deny the existence of God mostly out of a dislike for organized religion, which, of course, has its many problems. But then they struggle their entire lives trying to identify and become closer with this now unnamed spirit, something they wish to acknowledge but cannot call God.
According to the geometer Don Pedro Velasquez’s words in Jan Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript: “We are like blind men lost in the streets of a big city…” searching for something wondrous. But some of us, having seen that the handdrawn, handed down map contains a few errors, have burnt it entirely.
Great. Now people are going to think this is some sort of Christian website.
09 July 2004
concerning “function” and the biological imperative
08 July 2004
06 July 2004
a meditation on bread and wine
03 July 2004
last modified: 2004-11-02 08:03:59 -0500