A Year and a Day, Litha Park

Clearcutting Saves Forests! Fossil Fuels are Environmentally Friendly! and Other Absurd Things They Learned in School Today

Apparently sitting in a classroom today entails more perils than the threat of the deadly filmstrip we endured 40 years ago. While those newsreels and manically clicking frames of celluloid may have been dull and unimaginative (and tough to rewind), at least they didn’t carry a corporate agenda. But fast-forward 20 years and you find a new development: corporations who infiltrate classrooms with Pollyanna spins on their not-so-Pollyanna products.

Yes, your kids’ teachers face a myriad of options for whose bitch they want to be this semester, as corporations, PR firms, and industry associations deluge them with hundreds of handy free “educational” materials. These agenda-driven tracts outline the merits of anything from clearcutting forests to disposable diapers—while dismissing the hard science of such phenoms as ozone depletion and global warming. Among its many such packages, Procter & Gamble released “Decision Earth,” distributed to 75,000 U.S. schools in 1997. Without a pinch of irony—and even claiming to build critical thinking skills--this teacher’s resource stated, “Clear cutting removes all trees within a stand of a few species to create new habitat for wildlife. Procter & Gamble uses this economically and environmentally sound method because it most closely mimics nature's own processes... Clear cutting also opens the forest floor to sunshine, thus stimulating growth and providing food for animals."

You know, I’ve seen nature do a whole lot of exceptional stuff, but I’ve never seen it clearcut a forest before!

Speaking of utter stupidity with zero irony targeted, appropriately, at young children with malleable cerebella, the American Nuclear Society offers a kit cheering on nuclear power. And nuclear waste removal? Piece o’ cake! "Anything we produce results in some 'leftovers' that are either recycled or disposed of--whether we're making electricity from coal or nuclear, or making scrambled eggs!" Yep, kids, toxic nuclear waste is just like those gooey eggshells mom left on the compost heap this morning. Let’s just all line up in the kitchen and make a great big plutonium-filled omelet!

Someone oughta take these fuckers out in a field and shoot off their lying asses. Then they can head straight for that special circle in hell reserved for grown adults who promote bald-faced lies to impressionable children.

But quickly pushing ethics aside, let’s get back to encouraging our kids to become titans in facilitating the deaths of millions…also known as nuclear scientists. EnergySolutions, the largest nuclear waste company in the US, has just the ticket: A curriculum, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy in collaboration with high school teachers everywhere. Designed for the best and brightest juniors and seniors, “The Harnessed Atom” contains 10 interdisciplinary modules encompassing energy and society, nuclear physics, atomic structure, reactor design and operation, and risk analysis.

Thus, if your little Einstein grows bored with conducting simple home experiments, such as designing the now-cliché basement meth lab, he can go home and slap together a nuclear reactor in his own backyard—using a few basic cooking utensils and dad’s Leatherman Blast.

These nice EnergySolutions folks have gone all out, offering your kid’s teachers experiments, lesson plans, pre- and post-tests, lectures, and field-trip planning tools. So when young Tyler suggests a field trip to a place cool enough that Homer Simpson works there, his teacher can jump right on it.

Unfortunately, another DOE, the Mississippi Dept. of Education, has put its hand out for all such corporate freebies it can grab. You see, the state’s education budget isn’t in great shape, and the average high school teacher makes little over $20K. So having a preplanned curriculum probably looks like a much-needed time-and-effort reduction. And hey, it’s got such a positive message. Why teach reality when they will feel so much better entering the halls of denial at a young age? And conveniently enough, those damned liberals will also be put to the lie, as the EnergySolutions packet includes a trivia game citing the ecological damage introduced by bird-killing windmills and desert ecosystem-destroying solar farms. “We’re always looking for new ways to reach kids,” EnergySolutions’ executive director, Pearl Wright, states. Well, there’s one truth they’re telling. The company even offers its own personnel as “guest teachers.” So far, 400 Mississippi schools have drunk the Kool-Aid. Hoo-wee! It looks like the Mississippi delta will be slated for its very own reactor 30 years from now.

Curiously absent from such curricula are photos of those who survived Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. Statistics on breast cancer rates for those living within 25 miles of nuclear reactors. Anecdotal accounts from Japanese citizens who had their skin burned off or were stricken with leukemia as a result of this “perfectly safe” form of energy. Children love stories and graphics, don’t they? Maybe we can make a game out of it!

I hope some hot Mississippi day, when the livin's easy and the catfish of denial are jumpin' in the stream, some smart little kid raises her hand in class and asks the obvious question: “If nuclear energy is so safe, then why do they use it in the world’s deadliest weapons?”

“Because, honey, it clears the forest floor and opens the land to sunshine.”

For further information, see the 6/23/11 New Republic piece, “Core Curriculum”: http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-and-energy/magazine/90545/nuclear-power-energy-industry-lobby-department-education-school

Perfumes and Fragrances: Not Just Flowers Anymore

In a time when asthma, allergies and chemical sensitivities affect millions of people, we need to look at what we're putting in--and on--our bodies. The not-so-sweet smell of perfumes and fragrances may well be making our symptoms worse.

"Ah, You Smell Fresh As a Petrochemical Daisy!"

Several years ago, I posed to my women’s group a simple question: Can we ask members not to wear fragrances here? A hush fell over the room, then a silence so vast you could have heard a vial of Obsession drop. The same sweet women I’d grown to respect morphed into a pack of rabid wolves. No perfume?! It was as if I’d proposed giving up coffee, sugar, and styling gel in one fell swoop.

Since then, I have spent much time puzzling over their response. Are we so addicted to our scented products that the very notion of relinquishing them strikes terror in our hearts? Or is it more that the perfume industry has done such a stellar job in marketing its wares? Even in Santa Fe, where a comparatively high level of health-consciousness exists, we’re still susceptible to those redolent magazine ads, featuring the young and glossily naked in their evidently perfume-induced attractiveness.

But what if perfumiers, like chemical producers, were forced to include in their ads the manufacturer’s safety data sheets (i.e., the very interesting ways each spritz affects your liver). Sound far-fetched? Once hard-liquor ads were TV staples, and the Marlboro man strode freely around the range without that nasty Surgeon General’s warning pasted to his Wranglers. As with smoking and drinking, this, too, is an issue with major health implications. It has gained so little exposure only because the chemical industry maintains such a powerful arsenal of lobbyists, faux medical evidence, and hypervigilant fact-suppressors that even physicians cannot become properly educated on the topic. Most major pesticides are, believe it or not, sold by pharmaceutical giants. Now, there’s a form of ambulance-chasing I’d never even considered. Thus, each year, their lobbyists routinely present in state legislatures forged “medical proof” that people cannot be chemically sensitive.

The top 20 chemicals used in most commercial colognes include acetone and ethanol (central nervous system depressants on EPA and other hazardous waste lists), methylene chloride (banned by the FDA years ago in paint and varnish remover), and ethyl acetate (a narcotic and respiratory tract irritant that induces anemia, stupor, and even liver and kidney damage). Most of these agents have been proven to cause central nervous system disorders like Alzheimer’s, ADD, dementia, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

Of course the $20 billion perfume industry doesn’t advertise these facts. They’d like us to believe that the symptoms we feel in direct reaction to their products are merely “female hysteria,” a psychological malady. After all, how could a vat of toxic chemicals it took years to coax into smelling remotely like a flower be bad for anyone? The fact that people react to scents with respiratory difficulties, body pain, heart irregularities, headaches, inability to concentrate, fatigue, rashes, poor coordination, and even seizures is just a silly urban legend, like the albino alligators in the sewers.

I was not always a perfume nazi. Back in the 1990s, I was living a relatively healthy life and often slathered on a bit of the smelly stuff. Like others in my demographic, I’d been a bit taken in by the marketing tactics claiming that my desirability, sexual viability, and even femininity lie in my smelling “pretty.” However, in my late 30s, I suddenly began to experience symptoms ranging from severe dizziness to constant congestion to violent nausea to a depression so great I pondered suicide daily. Because I could barely get from the beginning to the end of a sentence, work became nearly impossible.

With the aid of several environmental physicians, I finally realized that I had been living in a house filled with mold. My entire immune system collapsed, and I became sensitized to chemicals, foods, metals, pollens, and just about everything else on the planet. In one month I dropped 30 pounds because I could tolerate only a few foods.

I became able to smell fragrances from across a yard—and they made me dramatically ill. It took me more than three years to partially recover, yet my heart still races and I start to feel dizzy when I sit next to someone wearing more than a drop of cologne.

Unfortunately, I am not alone. According to the National Academy of Sciences and the NM and CA Department of Health, 15% of the U.S. population is chemically sensitive. Twice as many people suffer from some form of chemical sensitivity (including Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) than have diabetes. Perfume affects not only MCS sufferers, but also those with asthma, migraines, allergies, and other afflictions. According to results aggregated from two studies in 2002-2003 and 2005-2006, 30.5% of the general population reported scented products on others irritating, 19% reported adverse health effects from air fresheners, and 10.9% reported irritation by scented laundry products vented outside. Considering that the number of chemicals we carry in our bodies constantly increases as new products are developing all the time, it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse. And given that our current administration wants to toss even more breaks to chemical manufacturers—while shredding environmental regulations—we’re going down fast.

Even in places known for their healthier lifestyles, such as Santa Fe, scents are still ubiquitous. I have begged the manager of my health spa to post a simple sign requesting that women refrain from using hairspray or spraying cologne, only to get glared at as if I were asking him to ban sit-ups. Restaurants seem not to notice that it’s hard to eat when we’re choking on the $6.99 Pepe le Pew special their server’s wearing. Almost every pharmacy in town sells perfume. (I guess they just can’t make enough profit selling alcohol and drugs.) And people think nothing of showing up reeking when going to a movie, theater, concert, class or other tight space. Believe it or not, we’d rather smell you in your natural state. If you’ve bathed within the last 3 or 4 days, it’s more than likely just fine.

Yet, thankfully, awareness does seem to be growing. In my town, several local doctor’s offices have clearly posted signs asking patients to avoid wearing scents. Other healthcare providers offer educational pamphlets about the dangers of perfume. One fitness center boasts fragrance-free workout areas. And a few churches request that congregants refrain from wearing scents. Personally, I’m looking forward to the day that swoon-worthy perfumes are as frowned upon in public places as cigarette smoke. I’d prefer to get my doses of acetone, ethanol, methylene chloride, and ethyl acetate elsewhere, thank you.

Refs
Stanley M. Caress, Anne C. Steinemann, Prevalence of Fragrance Sensitivity in the American Population, Journal of Environmental Health
http://water.washington.edu/Research/Articles/2009.JEH.prevalence.fragrance.pdf

http://www.healthyhouseinstitute.com/a_990-Are_You_Chemically_Sensitive
John Bower, Healthy House Institute, Are You Chemically Sensitive?

http://www.drkatherine.info/environmental_medicine/MCS_1.htm
Katherine Whited, Sociopolitical Aspects of MCS, Dr. Katherine Whited

Julia Kendall, Twenty Most Common Chemicals Found in Thirty-One Fragrance Products, The Environmental Illness Resource
http://www.ei-resource.org/articles/multiple-chemical-sensitivity-articles/twenty-most-common-chemicals-found-in-thirty%11one-fragrance-products/

Hiroshima/Nagasaki Anniversary: Keeping Vigil, Keeping Vigilant

This week marks the 66th anniversary of the United States’ nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today I attended a vigil, which our town has held for the last 30 years, to inform people of what happened in Japan in 1945 and to educate them about the history of nuclear warfare. The first vigil, during the early 1980s, was sponsored by my employer, Peace House, and its committed volunteers would fast over the 4-day period. Today I walked through displays of copious facts and photos, several of which I will probably never forget, though I’m glad I viewed them.

I feel a lot of shame these days. Shame at my country for its history of killing the innocent, its militarism, its perpetual aggression, violence and international terrorism. More than 200,000 people died instantly after the US bombed Japan. Somehow, I had forgotten how high this number was. In addition, hundreds of thousands were left permanently damaged, and god knows how many generations will sustain deformities. This was an action that didn’t have to happen. Germany had already surrendered and the Japanese had been brought to the edge of giving up as well. General Eisenhower told President Truman that the action was “completely unnecessary.” Our dropping those bombs was a total act of retribution, a bunch of boys wanting to make something big and powerful go boom, regardless of how many human beings they took out. That human life could be so objectified is beyond shameful. That people have continued to pursue this form of energy for profit, rather than shrinking away in the shame and horror of what they created, is hubris at its very worst. Every nuclear scientist should have to spend time touring Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting the survivors face to face, looking in their eyes and the eyes of their children and hearing the stories of their pain.

Then there is my own shame: shame for having worked in Los Alamos, NM, birthplace of this bomb. While I can (and did) justify my actions—I didn’t work for Los Alamos National Labs, I didn’t work in an era of aboveground testing—it was and still is a flimsy, lame excuse. Through the very act of choosing to work there, I was giving my tacit acceptance for the killing of innocent Japanese citizens, the killing of all of those who have sustained breast and lung cancers due to living in the path of nuclear reactors, and the potential for centuries of perpetrating the kind of harm we witnessed this year with Fukushima.

Despite a huge media cover-up telling us that the fallout was not harmful, the truth is that people will die and become ill not only from radiation exposure, but also from ingesting the milk and meat of cattle in its path. And that these effects will travel throughout the world, as they did with Chernobyl. The fact that it’s not happening right this moment, that most everyone appears “fine,” has nothing to do with the truth. It generally takes 5-20 years for people to begin to get ill from such incidents. The Russian publication Chernobyl concludes that 985,000 excess cancer deaths occurred between 1986 and 2004 as a result of radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.(1) Other estimates put that number at closer to 1.5 million. Fukushima may well end up killing more.

The first 3 weeks I worked in Los Alamos, I cried each day and didn’t want to go back. But at the time the job was offered to me, I had a severe physical illness and realized that it would provide something rare in NM: a good salary and the health insurance I needed. I felt trapped in a moral dilemma and chose wrongly. From my reading, I have come to understand the role of proximity to a nuclear reactor in my mother’s death. I understand that exposure to manmade nuclear fission products dramatically increases cancer, specifically breast cancer,(2) the type that killed my mother. The process of becoming informed involves a loss of innocence and, if we’re lucky, a stripping away of denial. I am sad to realize that my own denial enabled me to work for the entity that invented the atomic bomb. And as horrified as this makes me, at least I now have the ability to see clearly. Amazing the power of the political become personal.

The amends I want to make involve sharing with people what I’ve learned. Becoming more informed. Continuing to take action on this issue. Not sanctioning government expenditures of my tax dollars on war and nukes. And, if it helps even one little bit, offering a great apology on behalf of my country to all of those Japanese citizens affected by the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945. As I begin this vigil in my heart, I light a candle and pray for your health, peace, and well being.

(1) Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences) (paperback ed.). Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

(2) Jay Gould, The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996, p. 24.

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt
Mother and child, 4 months after the explosion of the atomic bomb.

Here is Amy Goodman's excellent piece about this topic:
http://www.nationofchange.org/kilotons-millisieverts-japans-nuclear-legacy-1312989458.

How Terry Ripmaster Made Me Love the Sixties (even more)

Thirty years ago today, I was 18 years old, about to enter my junior year of college, and prepared to lose my virginity about American politics to a guy with an FBI file as long as his arm and a rad revolutionary name to go with it: Terry Ripmaster.

That summer I was clandestinely dating a medieval scholar who resembled Che Guevara, trying to avoid a diminutive librarian who didn’t, and recovering from 4 semesters at a stuffy liberal arts institution, whose idea of radical action was offering its seminal Margaret Drabble workshop. In choosing a summer class, I went with something a bit less buttoned-up at a school nearer home. But the class description hardly prepared me for what would become the most compelling hours of my week: watching the aptly named Ripmaster teach The Cultural History of the 1960s.

When I think of Terry, I see a firecracker, a firecracker with the flame burned to the end of its fuse, ready to go off. Bright hazel eyes flashing, he’d tear across his stage at the front of a huge classroom, rasp-voiced and on fire with his passion for telling the truth—the truths most of us innocents had little idea of. Because he’d LIVED it—taken Freedom Rides with the SNCC, suffered ribs broken by police hoses, landed in a Southern jail. And had the stitches, the attitude, and the rap sheet to prove it.

If ever a teacher defined enthusiasm, it was this guy. Despite some nasty rumors I’d heard, as a teenager I couldn’t yet fathom the degree to which my government was up to no good. I may have had an angry edge, but I didn’t yet have my facts. But Ripmaster had news for me—the reasons why the 1960s culminated in fits of violent revolution, why fires had been burning all over Newark and Paterson, NJ, why the FBI and CIA were hypocrites and liars.

And then he set the class loose on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. If you’ve not read it, this scholarly, radical classic (recently updated!) is the book to read when you want the real truths, the ones our high school history books seem to have misplaced.

A core group of us extended every class by inviting Terry to join us in the pub, where we sat around and talked about the ol’ days over pitchers. After a few suds had splashed his goatee, he’d get even more rambunctious, yell and pound the table even louder. And we ate it up because we were hungry. This was a class that was galvanized around a love of the era and a great desire to understand the meaning behind what we'd lived through as children. For 4 hours/week, we felt like we had gone back to our bellbottoms and were inhabiting those issues, taking the same stands our predecessors had, rebelling against the status quo, hitting the streets for justice, celebrating our collective triumphs.

Thirty years later, the world has thrown different kinds of nasty challenges our way, filled with the almost-daily horrors that I joke should be part of a card deck called “Deal a Disaster.” And while radicals of the '60s faced similarly hard times, their approach felt much more active. There was a sense that change could happen, if they worked for it. Today feels to me more like being ground into pavement by a steamroller. With Americans powerless to do much but buckle under, as protests fall on deaf ears.

Last week, in a fit of dejection-fueled nostalgia, I checked out a Jefferson Airplane CD, which sounded about as old as Alexander Graham Bell yelling, “Watson, come here!” into the phone. But Grace Slick’s voice brought back that summer when JA and CSN were the constant soundtrack, when “Almost Cut My Hair” actually felt anthemic. Wow, it’s been awhile. And while I sometimes snort a bit when I hear that song, I sure don’t laugh at the sentiment behind it and the young people who actually took to the streets in protest—something that would never happen in the US today. (Unless, of course, Michelle Obama removed kids’ Apple products and substituted them with the real thing.)

I’ve heard that Terry retired years ago, as it became frustrating for him to teach classes to the stone-faced children of hippies, the Alex P. Keatons who hadn’t set foot in the ’60s and had no sense of it. He could storm around exhorting equal rights and revolution all he wanted, and the best he could hope for was that they grasped a few sacrifices previous generations had made so that they could sit there texting and smirking. Without at least an appreciation of what it takes to truly change the world, that generation has a hard road ahead. Landing in jail for protesting for what you believe in may suck, but complacency sucks a whole lot harder.

I’m glad my mind was still open to someone who had the power to do something that most teachers never did: to change my worldview, alter my assumptions, shift around some paradigms. Like any decent Weather Underground protest, he smashed the glass of my trusting innocence around matters of US policy. Made me realize how much Americans have been blatantly deceived by their own government. Gave me a sense of how much human-rights work was still left to do. And for that I tip my Howard Zinn to him, wherever he is.

[For more stories about Terry Ripmaster, see Scrap Paper Review #42, http://www.hourwolf.com/spr/spr0042.html]

The Demise of Borders: Buh-Bye Big Box

July 19 marks the death of both pork belly futures and Porky the Book Pig. And as a bacon lover, I feel worse about the former. As for Borders, save your tears--the behemoth has finally received its just rewards. While I’m not in the habit of taking pleasure in anyone’s ill fortune, Borders epitomized so much of the egregious behavior of the big-box raiders that it’s hard to waste Kleenex on them. Or bacon.

Yes, I am a former still-disgruntled Borders employee. It didn’t take long for me to get that way—back in 1998, I worked there for a brief while, in fact helped to build store 2226487 or whatever it was, in a Southwestern town that needed another bookstore like it needed another bottle of tequila. Before the marauder’s arrival, the town had lots of pleasant independent bookstores in which one could spend many happy hours browsing, drinking tea, and visiting with one’s bibliophile neighbors. Filled with literate clerks picking worthy inventory, they accompanied several decent music stores, of the High Fidelity variety… where you dared not bring the wrong selection to the register for fear of utter derision.

Within a couple years of Borders’ arrival--in the form of 2 stores, not just 1, in a town of 60,000--many of those same salubrious places were forced to close shop. And the ones that managed to stay open were barely squeaking by. Why? Because not only did Borders boast a much larger selection than indie stores could afford to keep in inventory, but also because the mega giant pushed the concept of discounting, whereas bookstores were previously able to sell books at full cost. I suppose we could point the finger at consumers for not supporting their beloved haunts, but in a town in which there are many smart-but-poor folks, the discount proved to be a big orange carrot. And yes, another finger could point to Amazon, but in 1997, Amazon was still a toddler.

Borders started all employees, regardless of their job responsibilities, level of education, or previous employment history at the same wage: one dime above minimum wage. Café employees were not permitted to set out a tip jar, which might have actually enabled them to earn a near-livable wage, ostensibly because Borders didn’t want their customers to feel “pressured” (the fact that there’s a tip jar on every other café counter in America mattered not). Oh, the utter filth of dollar bills sitting in a jar, distracting customers from their book-buying duties! I remember this being a great bone of contention, to the point at which some workers banded together and tried to form a union to address both the low wages and the tip situation. Goliath squashed them like a bug.

But lest you imagine that a minimum wage job in a bookstore means lots of time to kick back and read… I can't recall having read even a page. Borders was run very much like an army base. All that was missing were the drills with the rifles. On an hourly basis, we marched from job task to job task, in a timed and regimented fashion. Most bookstores (and I’ve worked in plenty) are laid-back and accommodating of individual work styles and preferences. If you want to cashier for a while, then shelve for a while, it’s easy enough to do that, as long as you maintain some semblance of workerliness. Instead, Borders had a job for every hour in your day, much like high schools have periods, and woe to you if you didn’t show up for your rotation. I’ve worked jobs that have paid 5 times as much and were 10 times less aggravating.

Unless you worked full-time, employee benefits were just about nil. Certainly no sick leave or vacation time, no stock options, retirement plans, and a measly discount on all food you bought at the café. Hey, at least you didn’t have to tip! They made a big deal of offering an “employee appreciation” 30% off holiday shopping day, which was a mad-festive 2 hours in which you got to enrich Borders’ coffers by spending your entire paycheck on their wares, yet somehow walked away feeling like Borders was so very generous for permitting this bit of holiday cheer. (Forget the fact that they made a mint on these employee-shopping sprees, as tens of thousands of workers drank the Kool-Aid.)

Borders’ managers were a cross between platoon sergeants and convent librarians. Sitting was not allowed, even when one was working the register and there were no customers for miles. Leaning was also verboten, even when one had worked an 8-hour day and had very sore feet. Talking or fraternizing with coworkers was frowned on, and employees who became too friendly were routinely separated or sent to a manager for a talking-to. Surprisingly, there was no detention. I was 35 when I worked there, but often felt like I was 12. I’ll be good…I’ll sell books…I swear…don’t hurt me…

Shockingly enough, Borders attracted the cream of the crop in employees—a fact I’m sure was completely lost on it. Among the original store clerk staff, I can count at least 3 with genius-level IQs, several with grad school degrees, a number who’d been in the workforce for at least 25 years, and many who would bend over backwards to help customers with even the most absurd requests. And when it came time to reward these shining stars, Borders stepped up to the plate with… about 25- to 50-cent/hour raises, after 6 months to a year.

The company relied on the fact that there was a degree of both desperation and masochism in the town’s job-seeking populace. For many workers, it was either this or unemployment. Borders took advantage of the fact that women who’d been long out of the workforce found it “pleasant” to get out of the house and earn a few bucks—literally. That those with PhDs in medieval philosophy would rather spend their days hocking Jude Deveraux novels than sitting home with an empty fridge. That writers like me were used to making pittances with their English degrees, so why not capitalize on this situation? And that some would have such low self-esteem that they’d even aspire to a higher level career as a manager in the corporation, and therefore be willing to “pay their dues” at starvation wages.

Fortunately my self-esteem and I took a big walk outta there 4 months later.

Did the giant shed a tear for the loss of a great employee? I think not.

Flash forward to 2005, when after gobbling through most conceivable American locations and shredding local indie timber like logs in a sawmill, the company opened its largest store: a 60,000-square-foot monstrosity in Malaysia, of all places. God knows they weren’t paying those Malaysian clerks the big bucks we Americans were making. And I’m guessing the rent was cheaper than in midtown Manhattan--or Boise, Idaho. But considering that Malaysia’s GDP for that year was less than US$8,000, I’m not clear on the logic of this move. Sometimes the patent manifestations of greed turn back in on themselves in a swirl of absurdity.

Trust me, I understand that bookstores are not high-profit entities, and thus, wages are low industry-wide. And of course there are certain sacrifices that bibliophiles willingly make to work with books, reasons why people may accept lower wages if working conditions are pleasant enough. However, most of the owners of independent bookstores I know do their absolute best to pay a fair wage and make damn sure their employees are happy and compensated in other tangible and intangible ways.

This was far from the case with Borders. The Goliath made it very clear that it was in BUSINESS. And to that end, it proceeded with an agenda of nothing but greed to systematically unseat all of its competitors in every market it entered. And enter it did, into just about every possible market—to the tune of 1,249 stores throughout the world. Just thinking about the loss sustained by all those businesses in its path makes me physically ill. Even if the leviathan was responsible for the closings of just two indie stores per location, that’s almost 2,500 local businesses felled by Augustus Gloop. And while Borders has filed Chapter 11 and its top execs are undoubtedly still sitting pretty with their multimillion-dollar severance packages, all of those 2,500 stores are gone forever. Not only is this an economic disaster, it also represents an inestimable loss of culture and community.

Big box stores were a giant soap bubble, the fantasy of children who wanted to believe that endless expansion and boundless wealth were possible. And for a while, that seemed in danger of appearing real. However, as E. F. Schumacher once noted, “Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.” I’m sure former Borders’ execs have not been sitting around reading Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. But now that they have a little time on their hands, maybe they can pick up a copy at their local independent bookstore.

“Je est un autre”: David Guterson's The Other

David Guterson's novel The Other could well be this generation’s Narcissus and Goldmund, a beautifully written book that feels like a conversation between a man’s ego and his more rigid superego. It’s a conversation that perhaps most of us middle-agers have had, between imagining how things might have been had we followed our youthful ideals to their fulfillment, and reviewing the bargains with life we’ve made. Guterson has cited The Other as his most autobiographical novel, and his two characters do indeed reflect many of the details of his Pacific Northwest upbringing.

The first is John William Barry, a wealthy scion who’s drawn to esoteric philosophy and the natural world. To say that he is principled is to say that the Dalai Lama is a bit of a Buddhist. Fierce, stubborn, and brilliant, he harbors such strong resistance to American society (“hamburger world”) that he can relate to just about no one. Except his friend, Neil Countryman, who, while no ugly American, has opted to lead a more traditional life: wife, 2 kids, teaching job. These two first connect as teens at a track meet, becoming fast friends in their desire to explore the outdoors, play chess, discuss philosophy, and smoke weed. Neil, who comes from a blue-collar, public-school background, is somewhat awed by John William’s wealthy family and golden boy aura, which seems to predestine him for greatness.

But while Neil attends college, John William quickly drops out to hunker down in a remote patch of woods near Olympic National Park. Of traditional education, he remarks, “The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you.” Despite his intellectual prowess, he’s more keen to learn primitive survival skills and to practice his spiritual views. After spending months carving a cave from a large hunk of rock in the woods, he moves in. Neil frequently makes the arduous trip, visiting and providing food and comforts from the outer world.

While Neil often tells us that his life’s course sits more toward center, his superego remains a demanding taskmaster, goading him about the life he could have led in the woods. His deep feelings for his friend are mixed to no small degree with awe and envy. And of course, Into the Wild’s popularity has shown us that there’s something quite compelling about a person who can live out their principles to the nth degree in this culture that so often insists on compromise.

But while John William and Chris McCandless are soul brothers in their resistance of the mainstream, Guterson is clear that his character is not simply a fictionalization of Chris. He notes, “…McCandless is very much in what I would call the mainstream romantic tradition, which includes wanderlust—he wants to move around the world and meet people. [But] John William is a morbid Gnostic. He has no romantic impulse. He’s too much of a dark realist to embrace the world the way that Chris McCandless did.”

It’s striking that the two critics who wagged their fingers at Guterson for copying Chris’ character hailed from NY and LA—where obviously all young men who go live in the woods are alike, so foreign a concept is that to their urban sensibilities. Here in the Pacific Northwest, I encounter dozens of such young men every summer—and while they’re undoubtedly familiar with Krakauer’s book, they’re certainly not all trying to be Chris McCandless.

Guterson begins The Other with a fascinating quote by Rimbaud, “Je est un autre,” which translates as, “I is another.” Expounded on by philosophers including Hegel, Sartre, Lacan and Derrida, this concept posits that the self requires an other to define itself. (This notion will be clear to anyone who has shopped at any New Mexico Walmart, after which a bout of self-delineation spontaneously emerges.)

A writer’s writer, Guterson understands that much of the story is in the details—and the details he chooses to include are pure genius. Of John William, Neil says, “With his head coarsely sheared, his foot-long beard, his buckskin shirt, and his rudimentary moccasins, he was so flagrantly absurd, so filthy, so post-apocalyptic, and at the same time so evocative of the early-nineteenth-century American West as portrayed in a bad museum diorama, that anyone with the poor luck to come across him could not be blamed for assuming he’d gone comically mad, or maybe dangerously mad, or, if seeing him distantly, through trees, say in mist—say while crouching fearfully behind a log—that he had to be a figment or a flashback.”

Anyone who’s had a dream has spent time chasing it to its denouement, wondering what it would turn into if lived purely and without compromise. Guterson offers us one version, though it’s ultimately a pessimistic one. As he aptly suggests, whenever principle becomes overly rigid, we set ourselves up for a fall. He later spends many postgame pages trying to deconstruct from multiple perspectives how Neil's friend became who he was, introducing a spate of developmental psychology and attachment theory in the process. This feels a bit tacked on to me, and the fact that the narrator suddenly becomes a very wealthy man also seems somewhat unnecessary. It’s the kind of detail that makes for compelling jacket copy, but doesn’t seem to really matter within the context of the book.

Guterson interjects a fair bit of Gnostic philosophy into the story of “the Hermit of the Hoh.” But this may be lost on the average reader, and required me to do a little admittedly superficial Internet research. Gnosticism is a path of transcendence through interior means. It encourages nonattachment and nonconformity to the world, a “being in the world, but not of the world.” But it acknowledges that not all humans are ready for Gnosis and liberation. Some are earthbound, materialistic beings (hyletics), who recognize only physical reality. Others, such as Guterson’s hermit, live largely in their psyche (psychics). Interestingly enough, Gnostics believe that the world is flawed because it was created by a flawed creator. This correlates directly with John William’s personal history, growing up with an insane mother, whose deep flaws seriously impact his development.

Whether to live out one's ideals as a hermit or to learn how to compromise in order to live within the world we inhabit is a longstanding debate. In Asian cultures, long periods of hermitry are accepted for those who feel drawn to an introspective path. It’s unfortunate that in American culture following such a path is discouraged in us from an early age, and there is no real mechanism in place to accommodate such a desire, other than completely dropping out. With few available options, we can end up as Neil and John William, at either end of a spectrum that seems to lack a middle ground of integration.