a virtual cantina

Pastures New

Started a new blog. It's over here: philsmfastory.blogspot.com

I'll try to post regularly, at least once a week, and not be one of those frustrating people who never updates and then updates all the time.

What Are Blogs For?

Wendell Berry is awesome.

So, all three of you have noticed that I rarely and irregularly post anymore, and this'll only get more rare and irregular as I am only occasionally on internet this summer.

But besides that, as I plan my move to South Carolina and try to consider how to best use the three years of writing time that've fallen in my lap, I find myself wanting to simplify and select among the things that take up my time. Before I left Milwaukee, I realized I was spending up to an hour a day screwing around online, reading stuff that did nothing for me as a scholar or writer or whatever: Aldaily.com, Slate, Pitchfork, various book reviews, various policy and Washington-gossip blogs, etc. I respect all these publications (well, except Slate), but I was treating them the way other people treat TV: as a time-filler. I have time and money to buy maybe 1% of the albums I read about on Pitchfork--do I need to check it every day? And the political blogs are very useful, but I need to decide which issues I'm going to spend time really working on and reading about, rather than becoming transiently obsessed with this or that legislative battle or public health threat.

Similarly, this blog has been such a grab-bag for such a long time that I'm hard-pressed to see what good it's doing anybody. I'm not consistently using it to keep in touch with people; it's not chronicling a discrete part of my life; it's not keeping a consistent focus on any political issues that I think the world needs to know about; it's not serving any activist or spiritual purposes; it's not impressive enough to net me any freelance-writing jobs. So, I think I'm going to let the blog be fallow for awhile, until I figure out what I want to do with it. If anybody has any suggestions besides "stuff it up yer bum," feel free to email me with them.

I'm also going to start to pull some of the posts that are most embarrassingly hasty, ill-written, careless, unfair, or personally revealing (i.e. lame).

Thanks to everybody who read this, and I will remain in touch, and an active reader of your own words (Whisky, Swags, etc.). Now, in fact, since I'm trying to live more deliberately, I'm hoping I'll be a better correspondent and a more active commenter.

Lastly, I want to take a minute to run through all the good things that have happened in my life as a result of my writing here:

--I kept in better touch with Brian, Jana, Swags, JRW, Hoekstra, Christian, Matt, and other people, and was able to supplement the other ways we've kept conversations going over geographical distances.
--I met Meg and cyber-met Darrell--wonderful writers, terrific people.
--I was able to be easily found by anyone who Googled me, leading to several renewals of contact--most importantly, with my dear friend since middle school, Adam.
--I was able, through mutual commenting, to get to know Stacey (of the now-defunct First Year Minister blog) a little bit as someone besides "That woman who I secretly think is really cool, but for dumb reasons, we kept not quite getting along in person."
--I was able to write my way out of a little bit of the anger and frustration of the dark early Bush years, the anxiety of my late 20s, etc.
And most importantly:
--I inadvertantly set off the chain of events that led me to the best girlfriend ever!

Prison Rape

From a letter (5/10/07) to the NYRB:

"Prisoner rape has been largely ignored: by journalists, advocates, policymakers, and researchers. The available data therefore, especially on its frequency, are not very good. Still, it is possible to have some notion of the problem's magnitude. Recent studies of prisons in four midwestern states suggest that approximately 20 percent of male inmates are pressured or coerced into unwanted sexual contact; approximately 10 percent are raped. Rates of sexual abuse in women's facilities, where the perpetrators are most likely to be male staff, seem to vary more by institution but are as high as 27 percent of inmates.

"Since the US now incarcerates more people than any other country, both relative to population and in absolute terms, these percentages translate into horrifying real numbers. The congressional authors of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), which DeParle does mention (and which is the only piece of federal legislation ever to address the issue), estimate in the bill's "Findings" section that in the twenty years preceding its passage over one million inmates were victims of sexual abuse in American facilities. That number should be recognized as something of a guess; but in the absence of more authoritative studies, it does not seem unreasonable. Prisoner rape is arguably this country's most serious human rights problem."

"... One needn't think of prisoner rape in legal or sociological terms to be angry about it, of course. Tom Cahill, a former president of Stop Prisoner Rape, was arrested during the Vietnam War for civil disobedience. An ideologically unsympathetic jailer put him in a cell with known sexual predators, telling them he was a child molester, and that if they "took care of him" they'd get extra rations of jello. For the next twenty-four hours Tom was gang-raped. He has never fully recovered from this. (I should point out, as a member of the board of Stop Prisoner Rape, that DeParle spreads credit for the enactment of PREA too thinly. Advocacy groups led by Stop Prisoner Rape were indispensable to its passage, and Tom was invited to the bill's signing ceremony with President Bush in acknowledgment of this.) To its survivors, rape in prison is often physically and almost always psychologically devastating. Inmates send letters to Stop Prisoner Rape every day recounting the attacks they've suffered and the lasting anguish these have caused. Every one of these stories is terrible."

I have nothing to add. Mr. Kaiser's letter says it all.

Well, one thing: Can we please stop making a joke if it? I know that I risk being labelled a Humorless Liberal when I fail to laugh at jokes about watchin' out fer yer cornhole. Since someone important to me is in prison, though, I think a better label might be Not Psychotically Dissociated. Or maybe Not Terminally Callous.

So It Goes

(And I'm guessing that'll be the overused blog-entry title of the week ...)

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. God rest his soul.

Slang Teacher

Tried to teach my eight-year-old nephew to say "That's how I roll" this weekend.

"Uncle Phil, why do you always wear your coat inside?"

"That's how I roll."

"What?"

"'That's how I roll.' It's a thing you say when people ask you questions you can't answer. So if someone says to you, 'Hey, Graeme, how come you have such cute freckles?', you just say 'That's how I roll.' You try it. Hey, Graeme, how come you like Star Wars so much?"

Graeme says, "'Cuz that's how I stiiink!"

Where I'm Going to MFA School

It's South Carolina by a nose.

So glad I don't have to go through that again. And so amazed I got anywhere with it.

The Nuclear Industry

Here is Marilynne Robinson writing, in 1989, about Sellafield:

... the largest commercial producer of plutonium in the world, and the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world's environment, is Great Britain ... The primary producer of plutonium and pollution is a complex called Sellafield, on the Irish Sea in Cumbria, not far from William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage. The variety of sheep raised in that picturesque region still reflects the preference of Beatrix Potter, miniaturist of a sweetly domesticated rural landscape. The lambs born in Cumbria are radioactive. ...

Sellafield has flourished in the care of Labour and Conservative governments alike for thirty-five years, during which time it has poured radioactive wastes into the sea through a pipeline specially constructed for that purpose, creating an underwater "lake" of wastes, including, according to the British government, one quarter ton of plutonium, which returns to shore in windborne spray and spume, and in the tides, and in fish and seaweed and flotsam, and which concentrates in inlets and estuaries. (Mother Country, FSG, 1989)

In 1997, a study found that children who live in the area near Sellafield "had twice the level of plutonium in their teeth as children living 140 miles away" (more info here). British Nuclear Fuels countered oh-so-convincingly that the radiation was probably fallout from nuclear weapons tests. In 2005, the THORP reactor--a newer part of the Sellafield complex which began operations in 1994--was found to have been leaking radioactive waste for the past eight months. The THORP reactor been closed since. It's scheduled for reopening sometime this year.
The British public seems not to favor further expansion of the country's nuclear industry--after all, this is the nation that saw the biggest pre-Three Mile Island nuclear "incident" (yup, Sellafield again, only it was called Windscale then), and then there are the unconfirmed reports of Cumbrian children dying in anomalous numbers from leukemia. Britons will take a lot of shit from their governments--speaking as an American, the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree--but they aren't keen on opening more nuclear plants, despite Tony Blair's reported enthusiasm (he's concerned about climate change, you sam). This spells trouble for British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., the "socialist" enterprise which earned billions from the operations of Sellafield, and lets the public absorb the risk--not to mention the plutonium. To maintain profitability, they're now seeking to trade their expertise to other countries.

Think about this. The list of "incidents" at Sellafield is a mile long--21 times between 1950 and 2000 there were "inadvertent off-site releases" of radiological material. The THORP leak was just a couple of years ago. There is no "expertise" here. Britain generally, and British Nuclear Fuels in particular, have not "solved the problem" of how to maintain a safe and healthy nuclear economy, and they thus have no "solutions" to go peddling around elsewhere.

Meanwhile, about six months ago, I read in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that America may try moving in on the fuel-reprocessing market (in violation of Ford/Carter-era agreements). Reprocessing is a guaranteed money-maker, if you can avoid poisoning anybody--all those nuke plants all over the world churning out dirty afterproducts, which can then go to reprocessors to have some of the dirtiest dirt cleaned out of them and be turned into saleable material which we're supposed to assume poses no proliferation risks. (Given the Bush administration's alacrity in securing Iraq--not to mention our speedy response to the dangerous number of nuclear sites that remain under-guarded in the old USSR--I'm sure they're just the people to start handling plutonium in large quantities.) And as people finally, finally pull their heads out of their asses and realize climate change is a reality, nuclear power is trumpeted here as a safe alternative fuel.

And what's really funny? The people whom I actually have some respect for--the activist and left-wing and environmental press--I don't hear about any of this from them. I'm left to piece it all together from old issues of the Bulletin, sundry Web sources, the BBC and New Statesman (the British press), and from a brilliant but badly out-of-date book by a novelist.

Robinson ends her book like this: "My greatest hope, which is a very slender one, is that we will at last find the courage to make ourselves rational and morally autonomous adults, secure enough in the faith that life is good and to be preserved, to recognize the grosser forms of evil and name them and confront them." To impose such a burden on our groaning planet--and on children, on the poor, on the far future--is surely among the grossest forms of evil. It poses a serious challenge to the "put-your-own-house-in-order" philosophy I generally observe when it comes to criticizing the actions of countries less powerful than America. The earth is my house, and I'd like to start helping put it in order. The first thing to do is to "perceive," as Robinson goes on to say--to learn about the nuclear industry, the burdens it imposes, the risks it takes, and where and when and in what precise way it does these things. That is going to be one of my projects from now on. Who's with me?