Goldilocks and the Three Banks

            Once upon a time, there was a pregnant borrower named Goldilocks who wanted to make a better world. She first went to an Occupation on the East Coast, where she organized the other pregnant women into a Birthing Camp. Even though much of the labor was voluntary (no pun intended), the Birthing Camp needed to purchase medical supplies, most of which were rather expensive. Goldilocks went to the Accounting Working Group to apply for Occupy Funds but was told that her application wasn’t in order. She spent a day gathering the necessary receipts and then two days waiting for a disbursement check. On the third day, she returned to their office on the twelfth floor near the Occupied Park.

            “What gives?” she asked the two young men in knit beanie caps. “I thought we had over a half million dollars in donations.”

            The men were hunched over their laptops, entering receipts into an Excel Spreadsheet. They didn’t look up.

            “What gives?” she said more loudly.

            Finally a third man came in with some take-out Chinese food. “Sorry,” he told Goldilocks. “We don’t do disbursements until Tuesday.”

            “But I’ve got women who could go into labor today!” said Goldilocks. “I can’t wait until Tuesday. This bank is too small!” Goldilocks stormed out the door.

            So Goldilocks left the Occupation and traveled through time and space until she came to The Promised Land (also known as California) where people like her were buying condos left and right. She filled out the application and within three days she was approved for a loan. On her way to the closing, she happened to run into one of the seven dwarves, who had just purchased a condo through the same lender. “Great rates!” said one of the dwarves (she could never keep their names straight). “Low closing costs!”

            “How great? How low?” asked Goldilocks and they compared the fine print. Goldilocks stormed into the conference room at Countryside. “What gives?” she demanded. “How come you gave the dwarf a better deal?”

“You’re a riskier borrower,” explained the mortgage officer, who looked a lot like the wolf from another fairy tale, “We had to go sub-prime on your loan.”

Goldilocks looked long and hard at the wolf. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with my father’s race, would it?” The mortgage officer quickly looked away. “We just follow the numbers on the application form,” he said.

“This bank is too big,” she said. “But not too big to be slapped with a housing discrimination lawsuit!” She walked out the door.

Goldilocks, who was now very pregnant, found herself in an unenviable position. While she had avoided the attack from the mortgage wolf, she didn’t have a condo or even a Birthing Camp. What she needed was a small community with a bank that was just right.

All her life, Goldilocks had been able to find the sweet spot between too big and too small. Indeed, she had developed a reputation for establishing the proper measure of things. Academics in cultural studies described her as the “people’s Aristotle” due to her intuitive knack for discovering the mean between two extremes. But the 21^st century was proving to be a rough century for Goldilocks. It wasn’t just banks that were too big or too small: Her housing options were equally extreme. She could either buy a big house that would cost a fortune to heat, or she could set up a tent at an occupation. Everywhere she looked, she saw too big or too small.  No doubt, her condition contributed to the sense that there was no middle ground; her belly seemed much too big for her small frame.

On Christmas Eve, Goldilocks went back to the Birthing Camp in the East and gave birth to a baby boy. “Oh my,” she said to herself, “the cultural critics will have a lot to say about this!” The child was, as many newborns are, just right and Goldilocks was pleased with his proportion. Still, she was dissatisfied with her living situation. Why couldn’t she find a bank, a town, a community that was just right? Goldilocks began to think it was time to try her luck in the middle region. If things were too small in the eastern camps and too big in the western developments, maybe they would be just right in Ohio.

But the news from the hinterland wasn’t good. A young woman in the next tent told her about her family’s neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland. As the baby napped, Goldilocks pulled out her iPhone and did a bit of research. “Until it closed its doors in December, the Ohio Savings Bank branch on North Moreland Boulevard was a neighborhood anchor, midway between the mansions of Shaker Heights and the ramshackle bungalows of the city’s east side,” wrote a reporter for the New York Times. “Now it sits boarded up.” Goldilocks put down the iPhone.  If the mid-West had no middle ground, where would she go?

Things were looking bad for Goldilocks and the newborn until she heard about something called the Transition Initiative. Her iPhone described a network of towns that were teaching themselves how to make do with less (which addressed the problem of Too Big) and were sharing resources with each other (which alleviated the problem of Too Small). There were a couple of towns in Southeastern Vermont that had begun the process of becoming Transition Communities and the more she read, the more she knew they were on their way to becoming just right. She said goodbye to her neighbor in the tent next door and got a ticket on the Megabus as far as Amherst, Massachusetts. With any luck, she should be arriving before the New Year.

Meg Mott teaches political theory at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at: www.megmottshottopics.com

On Eating Meat

Twice during the summer, we set up the outdoor kitchen behind the woodshed. Twice, we entered the tarp-covered chicken hoop and pulled pullets and cockerels from their sleeping roosts. At the end of those two harvests we had slaughtered enough birds to get the four of us through the winter. We determined to take out the final birds – a few old hens, no longer laying, and two or three ducks – when the band got back from tour. Even though the days would be shorter and the winds cold from the north, it seemed like a manageable project. After all, we were only talking about a half-dozen birds.

            But when it comes to killing poultry, numbers are misleading.  Killing twenty birds is a lot easier than killing six. Those summer birds were only distinguishable by gender and breed. When lowered into the killing cone, they were thanked for being a tender Buff Orpington or a proud Jersey Giant.  The next slaughter will not be so ambiguous. We knew each of them by name.

            A few days before The Event, we ran into an acquaintance at Agway. “How are the chickens?” she asked. “We have to kill some old hens,” I blurted out, much too loudly for a checkout line. “And two of the ducks,” I squeaked. “ She nodded sympathetically. “I let my hens die of old age,” she said. The cashier agreed. “Once the hens stop laying, we just keep them as pets.” I looked at Alison imploringly. “ It’s a space issue,” added my partner. “There’s not really enough room for them to overwinter in the henhouse.” The women understood. “Chickens can get pretty mean with one another if they don’t have enough space.” Dead-Eye Dixie, Sheila, and Bumpy would have to go.

            At the holiday party at work, I sought out the math teacher’s wife. “We have to kill two ducks,” I said. “They’re terrible to pluck, but the duck fat is worth it,” she responded. “But I love them so,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I love the way they duck their heads when they walk and the way they wiggle their tails.” I paused. “But I guess we’re going to kill the drakes.” “Duck sex is pretty terrible,” she pointed out. “They are so mean to the ladies.” Duck Fat and Gray-head would have to go.

I didn’t look for reasons to kill the nameless birds of the summer. They were bought with a specific kind of tenderness in mind, not the pornographic tenderness of a factory-raised bird, but the sweet and sinewy flesh of a heritage breed. We bought them for us, we raised them for us, we killed them for us. We killed them because we eat meat. But now that we’re killing Dead-Eye Dixie and her friends, I’m looking for other reasons to put them down. It’s not enough to say we purchased Bumpy with Chicken Marbella in mind. Now that they have names, are on their way to becoming pets, I can only justify their deaths by calling them mean.

Of course, this entire ethical problem could be avoided. We could either (1) stop eating meat; or (2) stop killing the meat that we eat. Of the four of us involved in this homestead operation, three of us have experimented with the vegetarian option, but none of us made it meatless through a New England winter. That leaves the second option: we could have someone else do our killing for us.

My son had an old t-shirt that said, “Nam: good soldiers, gutless politicians.” It pretty well summed up the problem of having someone else do your killing. Politicians have no problem sending other bodies off to war because, as George Orwell pointed out, they “are always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” Writing during the 1930’s, he observed how “the Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder.” Rather, they hide their atrocities with terms like “‘liquidation,’ elimination,’ or some other soothing phrase.” I would put factory farming in a similar category as these totalitarian regimes. Those animals are not killed, rather “meat units” are “processed.”

Tonight we’ll go out to the henhouse and snatch the unfortunate chickens from their roost. In the morning, I’ll corner the two drakes. I comfort myself by describing the killing of these particular birds as good flock management, but the real reason I am plucking Dead-Eye Dixie and Bumpy off this mortal coil is because I eat meat. The Chicken Marbella we had last week was not just divine because the breasts and thighs marinated for two days in wine, olives, oregano, capers and prunes; it was life-giving because a pullet was put to death.

In this era of industrialized food, we don’t like to see the death in our dinners and for that reason I apologize for the content of this week’s column. And yet, I can’t help but think that our aversion to killing makes us too easily soothed by the Hitlers and Purdues of this world. When we know the real work that goes into making a meat entrée, we are more likely to use that chicken well. The feet give oomph to a pot of black beans; the gizards, heart and back make a vibrant stock. Knowing what it took to make this food makes us very frugal cooks.

Industrialization encourages us to waste animals and waste soldiers. As more and more units are processed, we grow numb to the scandal. That numbing can be addressed, however, by getting closer to killing, by bringing it down to a human scale. The same argument, I think, could be made for war. Let those who still feel the pang of killing decide when it is truly necessary to kill more.

Ecological Uprisings

For Lisa B

            End of the semester and it was time to wrap things up. In Political Theory and the Ecological Crisis we spent the last two classes considering the following analogy: Dictatorship is to democracy as ___________ is to sustainable community. The list of entrees was long. “Car culture,” said one student. “Corporations,” said a recent transfer, who had spent most of his weekends at Occupy Wall Street. When I pointed out that Marlboro College was a corporation, he amended it to for-profit corporations. “Marlboro’s not-for-profit, right?” asked a freshman, who was also an occupier. Other contenders for the blank spot in the analogy were ‘consumerism,’ ‘oil dependency,’ and ‘the suburbs.’ “I suppose we couldn’t say ‘unsustainable community’?“ asked a freshman. “No,” explained a junior. “We have to stay with the first relationship. Dictatorship and democracy aren’t just opposites, their relationship is more dynamic.”

            We had just finished reading Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, a little book that has had a big influence on popular uprisings, especially during this past year. His “conceptual framework for liberation” was drafted in 1993 for the resistance movement in Burma and was most recently used by strategic planners during the Arab Spring. Sharp’s takeaway point is that dictatorships can be destabilized if the democrats are organized. Even the most brutal regimes will eventually topple, he suggests, if the people have a clear plan.

            Much of political theory is what Sharp would call a Grand Strategy for liberation. As far back as Plato, philosophers offered us Big Pictures that undermine tyranny and enhance human flourishing. The goal of most modern political theorists (notably John Locke and Karl Marx) is to increase the freedom of the participants, to liberate each person’s energy from the domination of the state (Locke) or the market (Marx). But all these Grand Strategies for liberating human energies assume a world where natural resources are abundant. Even Marx, whose young family suffered in the poisoned shadows of London’s coal-spewing factories, did not factor environmental conditions into his Plan for a Better World.

            “There’s a reason we are having a hard time finding a word to fill in the blank,” I told the class. “Political theorists have been talking about dictatorships and democracies for hundreds of years. Thanks to all that philosophy, we have a rich understanding of those concepts. ‘Sustainable communities’ doesn’t have that rich tradition. We’re still trying to figure out how to describe the antagonistic relationship between sustainability and its vaguely-defined partner. That’s the future work of political theory: to create a Grand Strategy for a Sustainable World.”

            A fine flourish for the final class, but as I left the students to complete their course evaluations, I wondered about the truth of those words. Maybe the original analogy was incorrect. Maybe there is no resonance between the path to liberation and the path to a sustainable world.

            (Long pause)

            Each time I have that thought my brain freezes. Others have reached this impasse and then opted for preserving the planet over human liberation. Garret Hardin, who came up with the concept, “tragedy of the commons,” also came up with the concept of “the lifeboat,” in which a portion of the population is saved while the bulk of humanity starves. He was charged with promoting eco-fascism, of putting
sustainable community in the analogous slot to dictatorship, not democracy.

            (Longer pause)

            The nice thing about a semester is that besides having endings, with their flourishes, there are also beginnings with their freshness. Plato, I remembered, did not speak of Grand Strategies but of discovering natural patterns. In order to build a strong republic, he wrote, we needed to discover “the patterns” of nature, the just relationships between things. He described the just state as one where consumption was regulated, and where each member did the job appropriate to his or her natural talents. The job of the political scientist, then, was one of discernment, not implementation. Look to the patterns of the world, said Plato, and then act in accordance with those natural laws. Don’t exceed natural speed limits; don’t live beyond your means.

Plato had a ready-made concept for the class analogy. In the blank spot paired with “sustainable communities,” he would have inserted “City of Pigs.” In the City of Pigs, the people ate more than they should. Having wasted their resources, they had to go to war to get more. Being creatures of excess, they weren’t particularly good at soldiering and so were quickly brought down. Thus ended the City of Pigs; a state that always ends.

What was true in Ancient Greece continues to be true today. The only difference is that we have strayed so far from the natural pattern we don’t recognize our excesses. But the pattern is there to be discerned, says Plato, it has always been there. It’s only our unhealthy habits that keep us from following its laws.

Unfortunately, the United States, the country that promised to show the world what democracy looks like, behaves evermore like the City of Pigs. We confuse liberation, the freeing of creativity, with consumption, the unleashing of indulgence. When the City of Pigs extolls the glory of democracy, it is actually demanding more food for itself. No wonder the class was stymied by this simple analogy. Only Plato’s theory exposed this contradiction. After all these modern thinkers, we were primed to locate the problem outside of ourselves.

Dictatorship is to democracy, says Plato, as the City of Pigs is to a sustainable community. We don’t need lifeboats to save a master race, we just need to stop being excessive. We are the dictators who must be toppled by our better selves. By following the patterns of nature, the just relationship between all things of this world, we can moderate our demands on the planet. Otherwise, this Global City of Pigs will end.

           

           

Will to Power

 

Beaumont may be a lovely rooster but he is half the man that Franklin is. When Franklin rises up on his tiptoes and beats his wings, he takes up about four cubic feet. Beaumont, with all his valiant fluttering, is lucky to push past two. When Franklin crows at three in the morning, he punctures the gloom with hearty notes of defiance. When Beaumont crows two minutes later, he barely scratches the surface of the night. When Franklin asserts his manhood with the layers, they quietly submit. When Beaumont attempts an amorous alliance, he is firmly pecked away. 

Rather than internalize the constant indignities of being No. 2 Rooster, Beaumont shows no signs of giving up. The urge to puff himself up, to beat his wings, to crow two hours before dawn, to jump upon a hen, is stronger than any momentary humiliation.  He may be chased by Franklin and refused by Henny Penny but that doesn’t stop him from reasserting himself two minutes later. Still, I couldn’t help thinking he was making his life harder than it needed to be.

I thought about telling him that patriarchy was overrated. “You don’t have to buy into machismo,” I wanted to tell him. “Just because society tells you to beat your wings and go after the hens, doesn’t mean you need to do that.” I wondered what he would think about the theory that reality is socially constructed, that all this crowing and humping was just an arbitrary arrangement set up to support economic interests. According to this school of thought, everything we call natural, such as gender and race, is actually a fiction that human beings created. But as I watched him scratching the frosted earth where the winter sun had peeled away the snow, the premise of the argument seemed implausible. How could I convince a chicken that nature doesn’t really exist?

Instead, I appealed to his self-preservation. “You realize that Franklin will kill you if he thinks you’re getting too uppity. He only lets you hang around the hen yard because you stay out of his way. If you start acting as if you’re just as entitled as he is, things will go very badly for you.” Beaumont shook his head fiercely, making the silver cowl around his neck puff up like a cobra. Then he stood up on his tiptoes and beat his tuxedo wings boldly. Franklin came running around the corner to police the situation and Beaumont went back to pecking the ground. The minute Franklin disappeared, Beaumont let out one of his scratchy adolescent crows. Franklin rushed upon him and Beaumont took off like Roadrunner, the cartoon character who disappears leaving a single feather in his wake.

“See what I mean,” I said when I found him preening his feathers behind the woodpile. “You got to keep it cool.” But Beaumont looked pleased with himself. He’d made the big guy run and big guys don’t look quite so dazzling as small-boned dashers. At least that’s what Beaumont told himself. As far as he was concerned, his small frame and high-pitched crow embodied the new standard of rooster. “I am what I am,” he said, standing gracefully on one leg, his foot raised daintily above the thawing mud, his head tilted to a most flattering angle. But his elegance was marred when he crowed twice to rather pathetic effect. So pathetic that Franklin chose to ignore him. “Just don’t get too cocky,” I warned him.

Political theorists might call Beaumont’s behavior “resistance.” By refusing to acknowledge Franklin’s authority he subverts the established social hierarchy. Even though the big boss man tells him there’s no place for him in his world, Beaumont insists on taking up space. “You’re quite the revolutionary,” I tell him, but, so far, he has very little interest in politics. Beaumont’s interests are pretty much centered on just being Beaumont.

But being Beaumont is not just a matter of racing about the yard in a handsome tuxedo. This bantam bird has tapped into a primal energy that causes him to strut and crow even when safety recommends otherwise. Deep within him is an irrepressible need to fully be the little guy he is, to voice his soprano lustiness, to make his unrequited desires known. He’s been at this game long enough to know he’ll never be Number 1, but that doesn’t stop him from glorying in the loveliness of life as Number 2.

All of which suggests that the way out of the many humiliations this world provides may have less to do with deconstructing social reality and more to do with tapping into our inner deep springs. Friedrich Nietzsche called these deep springs “the will to power,” the individual’s primal urge to express something essential from within. According to Nietzsche, this intrinsic wisdom is constantly challenged by a social need to judge right and wrong by other people’s standards. Rather than take our life force seriously, he says, we tend to judge our efforts through others’ eyes.

But not Beaumont.

Having tapped into this irrepressible energy, Beaumont has transcended any shame associated with life on the lower rung. Franklin may think he’s a runt, the hens may cluck about his deficiencies, but Beaumont persists in being fully Beaumont. Indeed, one could argue that all that ostracism has created the perfect classroom. He didn’t need me to teach him about the social construction of reality nor about Nietzsche’s will to power. His lowly place in the pecking order provided lessons enough.

Beaumont tells me he doesn’t have time for this sort of philosophizing. The sun is up, the birds are out in the winter garden scratching in the thawing beds and Beaumont is crowing for all he’s worth. A squeaky adolescent crow, for sure, but with every expression he teaches himself the measure of his own self-worth.