The article starts with a nice idyllic view of Madison, where residents knew panhandlers by name and interacted with them amicably. It contrasts that picture with a current fear of the homeless resulting from two unsolved murders in the downtown area. In both cases the victims were killed in their homes, in the middle of the day, presumably by strangers. The police have focused some of their investigation on homeless in the area. This has, apparently, included taking DNA samples. This resulted in some arrests on other charges, but no break in the murder cases. The LA Times article suggests that some of the services Madison does provide for the homeless (including some shelters downtown as well as meals) are coming under popular attack.

Despite the story’s first paragraph, I don’t think that Madison can be said to be newly ambivalent about providing services to the down and out. Already in the late 90s there was a strong move to “clean up” State Street. The fact that Peace Park was a gathering spot for the homeless and various counter-culture kids at the time I was writing my thesis was precisely because increased enforcement of anti-loitering laws had pushed various groups who used to hang out along the whole of the street into one place. When I had first started thinking about my thesis various recognizable groups of street characters were arranged up and down the street. The cleanup effort involved things like refitting an area of concrete risers that had previously been a popular place for skateboarding and general hanging with planters to remove virtually all horizontal surfaces that could be sat upon. The street kids quickly learn exactly what surfaces they could sit on and where precisely the could congregate without running afoul of the local police patrols. For the most part, this boiled down to “don’t scare away the customers that patronize our restaurants and shops.” The article cites a rule allowing panhandling in only two places on State Street. I don’t think that had been codified at the point where I left Madison, but in effect there were only two places where panhandling took place without running afoul of rules about blocking traffic-flow on the sidewalk.

Even if the services available to the homeless were extremely generous, Madison would hardly be a likely haven for the vagrant. Winters often come equipped with bitter cold and substantial snow. There certainly isn’t a guarantee of a bed in a shelter and even if you have a place to go at night, many of the shelters for singles don’t let you stay during the day. I don’t know the details of the regulations for the shelters that served single men and women without children but I know all the city-funded family shelters allowed only a 30 day stay per year. Given that the average time to find housing in Madison was twice that, it’s hard to argue that the regulations were overly generous. Even for those trying very hard to get a job and get housing, the chances of success before the clock ran our were slim. Most of the subsidized options either had years-long waiting lists or required the kind of pristine credit histories that most people who find themselves in homeless shelters simply can’t boast. In short, even those with the motivation to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in 2001 often couldn’t. I can’t imagine that with the current economic situation that it’s become much easier.

And thus even if the recent murders can be attributed to homeless individuals, calling for fewer shelters and less tolerance of panhandling (and congregating in sheltered places such as the basement of the capital building) isn’t a logical response. In a city where only mothers with perfect credit can get into subsidized housing projects, and housing searches take longer than any helping hands are available, the problems that come with having a population of unhoused individuals simply can not be solved through increased enforcement against loitering and panhandling or reduction of available services. At best such strategies relocate problems to some other municipality (without in any way assuring that the problem won’t come back).

Of course my experiences were with homeless mothers, and mostly harmless street kids. It would, perhaps, be fair to accuse me of naivety and to argue that homeless men with substance abuse problems and mental illnesses are an entirely different kettle of fish. And that would be a fair point but I would still assert that passing laws to target the homeless, increasing police enforcement, and reducing access to shelter and food will only serve to make problems worse. In the absence of affordable housing, mental health care, and treatment for substance problems there’s little hope of reducing the possibility of violence in an urban landscape. Madison could, of course, take the tact of moving the problems out of the “good” neighborhoods into the “bad” ones.

Mostly, though, this article makes me sad because the truth is that there’s been violence in that area for years. Throughout my time living just off State Street my mother would worry because of newspaper articles about stabbings at night on side streets downtown. Those acts of violence didn’t fuel enough backlash to make the LA Times, though, because they weren’t acts of violence against nice middle-class people in the middle of the day.

As a freshman at UW I took an honors comparative literature class that focused on Kafka, Beckett, and Borges. It was intense, strange, and wonderful. The class itself often felt a bit like a Kafka novel in that we were required to write responses each week and a final paper on one of the three authors, but what the professor expected these writings to contain was a mystery. I’m sure I would have found that less weird later in my academic career but at the time the intellectual freedom to do what I wanted with the ideas was a bit scary.

For the final paper I focused on Kafka, reading his letters and some of his stories that we did not read for class. Meanwhile my friend Chris wrote her paper on Beckett. In the course of doing extra reading for her paper she came upon the line “Doubt, Despair, and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these?” She used this line in the subject line of an email she sent me (I don’t recall what the email was about but I’m willing to bet that it was related to our uncertainties about the academic work at hand, paired with our relative uncertainties about various romantic entanglements). This line has stuck with me, despite not actually knowing what a bath-chair is nor how this line fits in with the rest of the piece from which it comes (it’s in More Pricks than Kicks, which I seem to recall was even more confusing to me than even the rest of Beckett).

Years later I began listening to Sleater Kinney. I was a late-comer to much of the cool stuff on the Kill Rock Stars label, picking it up long after it was new and hot. I think it was 2004 or so when I began listening to Hot Rock, a good nine years after release of the album and seven years past my semester of immersion in Kafka and Beckett. Still every time I hear the song “The End of You” I find myself jolted into thinking about that snippet of Beckett when I hear the verse which includes the lines:

Tie me to the mast
of this ship and of this band.
Tie me to the greater things
the people that I love.

I seriously doubt this is actually a reference to Beckett.  It’s more clearly (taken in the context of the rest of the song) an allusion to The Odyssey but still every time I hear it I think, even if only for a fraction of a moment, of that line and the way I was back then.

I miss the intensity of classes tackling things so unfamiliar they pulled me far out of my comfort zone and made me think things I swear it would never have occurred to me to think on my own.  How do you capture that outside the university?  Certainly reading widely is one way, but how do you recreate the intensity of classes?  Perhaps the only answer is to build a time machine and go hang out with Gertrude Stein and Picasso in Paris.

And for those who don’t get the title of this post, it’s a reference  to the talk “Deconstructing playing with Katie” from the Animals and Society section of the 2006 ASA, which Jeremy Freese discussed here (and elsewhere but I’m too lazy to dig for it).

I’m slowly reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and I fully intend to get to Michael Pollan’s two recent food books soon as well. I’ve also been reading a lot of gardening blogs and the great sociology blog on food, critical eating. All of this has me thinking a lot about where food comes from, the connections between farming and the environment, and the general politics of agriculture. Well, I’d like to be thinking about the general politics of agriculture but I don’t really know enough to form any sort of coherent analysis. I know there’s a whole system of subsidies. I know this country has shifted to a lot of factory farming. I know that understanding some of the ins and outs of free trade requires understanding farm policy. But beyond that I’m virtually clueless, which is pretty embarassing given that I grew up surrounded by farmland (though my family never farmed).

Can anyone point me towards good histories of farm policy in this country? I’d like to understand what the current policies are, where they came from, and what interest groups were involved. I don’t really have a clue where to start, short of combing through syllabuses online for pieces that look interesting. Since I’m shortly going to be heading into a period of unemployment and job searching it seems like a good time to put together a reading list to expand my knowledge on the subject.

p.s. Yes, I know, asking for reading suggestions implies that I think I actually have more than a small handful of readers.  There is no evidence to support this assumption but I’m an optimist.

Why am I so eager to finally bet the fence repaired? I’ll give you a guess, just one. Yes, the neighbors. I want to be neighborly, I want to believe in community, I want to not lock myself up in a walled property. I mean theoretically I want those things. Realistically I desperately want a fence because the neighbors are driving me nuts. It started with the dog. Smokey, the little yappy dog who obviously can’t recognize property boundaries without a fence. As far as Smokey is concerned, without a fence our yard is his yard, and he has every right to raise the alarm when we tread upon his territory. If it were just the dog, I might feel differently about our fence contractor. If it were just the dog I’d probably not look upon this man as a savior instead of just a craftsman.

It isn’t just the yappy dog who doesn’t recognize the privateness of this property. The neighbors too seem to feel there is no problem with their dog venturing across that invisible line. Not once in a year have I heard so much as a mumbled “sorry about that.” What’s more when I work in the garden one of the neighbor women seems to feel that because I have been polite and chatted with her across the invisible line that it is perfectly fine for her to come wandering over into our yard uninvited. Where she stays and talks and talks and talks while I’m working.

I am the child of hippies. I should appreciate these conversations. But I don’t. I want nothing more for her to shut up and leave me in peace to my digging, weeding, and planting. Recently her husband, previously the silent type, broke the ice and started chatting. After hearing all about his job, the cost of rebuilding the engine on his car, and about how his kids from a previous marriage are trouble makers, I’d had about as much community as I could take and suggested to B. that the time had come to stop talking about fixing the fence and actually call someone to do it.

At some philosophical level I feel bad about this. I feel bad for disliking my neighbors. I feel bad about being so petty that I care about the trespasses of a sweet little dog who doesn’t know better. But I crave solitude, I crave space, I crave a frame around my landscaping (which is my primary form of artistic expression right now). The truth is that I love living in a house rather than a crowded apartment building and I cherish my back yard (even though I hate the cult of the lawn, which plagues my relationship with the front yard).

I understand now that the saying “good fence make good neighbors” is an expression of individualism, a proclamation of our belief in the importance of private property. But when it comes right down to it I have to admit that I don’t have much of a communal nature. I grew up with privacy and isolation galore and it turns out that I’m not willing to give that up despite having moved to an urban (now more suburban) environment. I imagine this fence will transform the people living on the property behind us into very good neighbors indeed.

I try not to be politically apathetic. I really do but all too often the ballots are overwhelming and I end just guessing on a lot of it. While that’s perhaps not a bad strategy for your average multiple choice tests it seems like a lousy strategy when the test is “what do you want politics to look like for the next X years.” In some sense I think voting blindly is really worse than not voting at all so I often skip things that I haven’t had a chance to research, particularly if they’re non-partisan positions where I’d be voting based on something utterly arbitrary like gender or how melodious the names are.

I can’t help but believe that lots of people go to vote on the basis of one or two races that they’ve thought about and either ignore the rest of the ballot or wing it. We live in a world that’s really too complicated to understand the ins and outs of everything going on politically. And this brings me back to the propositions. On the whole my friends are a pretty informed bunch and typically a group of us get together before elections to discuss the various candidates and propositions. Often with enough people gathered together reading the information in the voter’s guide carefully it’s possible to figure out the general gist of a proposition and come to some conclusions about the potential consequences of voting for or against it. However, it’s not rare to have one or two (or more) propositions that no one in the room can quite manage to sort out well enough to even guess the implications. I suspect most votes just go off the small summaries that appear on the ballots. These often turn out to be pretty misleading once you delve into the actual text of an initiative.

I like the idea of the people having input into the political system. I’m just not sure that this system is the most sensible way to allow that. Lots of things end up on the ballot that leave me shaking my head and wondering why we are being asked to make this decision rather than professional politicians who actually know something about the state budget and needs. I mean there are lots of things that I think it’s important to spend money on: education, environment, infrastructure but I don’t have enough of an idea of the big picture to really be making budget decisions on those things. And if you don’t look closely at things it’s hard to know who is even asking you to make decisions about bonds, etc.

Usually when I read the voters guide carefully I find myself thinking something like “you know if I wanted John and Joan Everycitizen to run the state/city I would have elected them to office .” It’s not even really that I don’t trust my fellow voters to vote in their own self interest, I simply don’t trust them to take huge chunks of time out of their daily lives to figure out what’s actually on the table. I don’t mean that to be in any way condescending. I simply mean that if I can’t figure out what’s going on with these things even when I try can I really trust that everyone else is a) trying to understand the propositions and b) actually succeeding in figuring out what they mean and what their consequences are?

This time around things aren’t so bad. Four of the seven props are about Indian gaming and it appears at a glance that all four are a vote on the same agreement with four different tribal groups. So I only have to figure out how I feel about it once. And prop 91 is apparently no longer actually relevant due to a previous proposition. So I only have to actually make three different decisions at this point. But I do still find myself fantasizing about proposition stfuadyjl. That would be proposition shut the fuck up and do your job, legislators.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the coming primary election. Yes I live under a rock culturally speaking but I do read the Economist and the LA Times pretty frequently and I regularly interact virtually with people who read news from all sorts of places. So my living under a rock has not protected me from the inundation of election madness. Thus, this page from transmet really spoke to me (click on the snippet below to get my lousy scan of the whole page).

And yeah, I haven’t actually figured out how I’m going to cast my vote.  I mean there are so many appealing ways to be tortured.

“We have seen how Pell Grants help low-income college students realize their full potential. Together, we’ve expanded the size and reach of these grants. Now let us apply that same spirit to help liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools.”

This inspired in me a brief moment of hope that perhaps in the years that I haven’t been paying attention to the state of need-based aid for college undergrads we’d made some progress in funding higher education for poor students. Of course that moment of hope melted away when I looked at the current numbers. As an undergraduate at University of Wisconsin I was a work-study student worker in the financial office for two years. During that period I came to understand that, though my background disadvantaged me in certain ways, I was very lucky that my parent’s economic situation wasn’t ever so slightly better. Lots of students coming from families with incomes in the $40,000 and above range were eligible for very little federal or state need-based aid. Combine that fact with the fact that the limits on stafford loans were lower than tuition at UW and the school had almost no aid available above what was available from the government, and there were a lot of people for whom the question of how to pay for their education wasn’t an easy one.

UW is a relatively cheap school in the grand scheme of things (I know I certainly feel like I got a fantastic bargain given the quality of my undergrad education). Still let’s look at the numbers and see how things look for students at a state school (note that all the following figures come from UW’s Office of Student Financial Services). The estimated cost of attendance for a year, including tuition and basic living expenses, for a Wisconsin resident is currently about $18,000. Let’s assume for the moment that we’re looking at an extremely needy student who is eligible for all federal aid. Said student would typically be eligible for $4,800 in Pell grants and maybe as much as $2,800 in low-interest Perkins loans. There is also some available state money, but the UW finaid page doesn’t give the limits. Let’s assume for these calculations that the neediest student could get $4,000 in state aid (I think this is considerably higher than when I was there but call me an optimist). Our hypothetical student would also be eligible for work study up to $2,500 (note, though, that work study doesn’t really benefit the student any more than any other student job, though it is a boon for the employer and may make it easier for a needy student to find employment). Ok, so our hypothetical student so far is eligible for about $14,100 in aid, which is probably a generous estimate given my guess on availability of grants from the state. Let’s stop for a moment and notice a very important relationship between two of the numbers I’ve just outlined: $14,100 is less than the estimated $18,000 that it takes to pay tuition and live on campus for the year. Ok, so our hypothetical student is going to have to take out another loan. If said student is a freshman he or she is eligible for $3,500 in Stafford loan. That brings the grand total up to $17,600. Well, that’s not so bad, right? I mean this student can pick up a second job or something to make up that missing $400, right?

You’ll notice that my hypothetical student who is eligible for the max of everything at a relatively cheap state school still would not necessarily be offered enough financial aid to actually pay all their expenses for a year, even if the formula used to estimate student’s financial need determined that the parents were too poor to be expected to contribute to their education. Running those numbers and coming out $400 short may not sound so bad until you consider that much of that aid is really only available to the neediest of students. Unless the Pell program has expanded eligibility requirements dramatically in the past seven years, many students simply are not eligible for any of that $4,800.

There are too many variables (and I haven’t looked at any of the requirements in too long) for me to offer a simple income threshold where eligibility for need-based aid drops off. But I will say that in 1998 or so students coming from families with incomes above about $45,000 weren’t going to be eligible for much more than work study and stafford loans. For a freshman that would add up to a total of about $6,000. You don’t have to be a math whiz to realize that $6,000 is much less than $18,000. In fact, $6,000 is less than the in-state cost of tuition for 2007-2008.

I’m not even going to try this thought experiment for someplace like UCLA where both tuition and the cost of living are somewhat higher (estimated total cost of attendance for CA residents is about $22,000).

It’s not like any of this is new. But it’s depressing nonetheless. And it’s even more depressing to know that Bush is patting himself on the back for Pell grants and hoping to replicate that “success” with primary and secondary education. I suppose, though, I shouldn’t be surprised. After all the department of defense’s budget is almost 7 times larger than the department of education’s budget. I think that right there tells us a lot about the state of the union.

When the series first came out there were a couple of billboards for the show I drove past regularly. I can’t find a picture of the cast for the first season all together, but imagine if you will a billboard with a black guy, a Saudi, a french man, a bosnian, and a blond white boy from Berkeley with the tagline “Friends. Neighbors. Husbands. Terrorists.” With that as my only previous information about the show I was pretty much expecting an utterly offensive train wreck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for highlighting the fact that not all arabs are terrorists and not all terrorists are arabs but the advertising made Sleeper Cell look like fear mongering of the “oh my god fear everybody” variety, which doesn’t exactly strike me as an improvement. So I opened a bottle of wine and settled in to see how bad it really was.

I’ve been considering writing about it all week but I figured I’d watch both seasons to see how it all played out. I watched the last episode yesterday (and I’ll note that really I probably would have been happier just leaving things as they were at the end of the second to last episode). All in all I will say that it’s decent television as such things go and it’s certainly a better take on the war on terror than I feared it would be but in the end I still felt that it raised too few questions about our country’s anti-terrorist actions. The series follows Darwyn, a black muslim undercover FBI agent, as he infiltrates a terrorist cell. One thing the show does very well is portray Darwyns conviction that the actions of terrorists are not the actions of people true to the muslim faith. The show seems to do a good job of using quotation from the Koran to really underscore the message that not all muslims are terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. When developing the characters’ histories some of the history behind the development of Al-Qaeda comes out, at least between the lines. I would have liked, though, to see more about Farik’s death sentence in Saudi Arabia since it might have helped underscore the fact that western governments aren’t the only ones concerned about terrorism and extremists.

My major beef with the show, though, is the way that American policies and actions are mostly left unquestioned. Sure there’s a little comedy having to do with an LAPD detective being unwilling to drop a case despite having been told to do so by the FBI. Sure there are a few cases where FBI incompetence gets people killed (including one guy who had essentially been set up by the FBI anyway). Yes, Darwyn recognizes that the Afghani kid who wasn’t involved with terrorists until after he was released from Gitmo was an instance where “we fucked up” but how can you really be an FBI undercover agent with the kind of deep morality that we’re supposed to believe this character has and not be mad as hell about a kid being taken into custody (and probably tortured) because some village leader wanted the bounty money for turning in terrorists? That’s more than “we fucked up.” That’s “the whole system is based on repeating this fuck-up unquestioningly.” Meanwhile later we see Farik in custody and while the water boarding isn’t show on screen it’s mentioned off-handedly in one of the interrogation scenes. After that he’s extradited to Saudi Arabia so that he can be tortured by a Saudi Arabian torture expert rather than the U.S. marine (who’s there and looking on).

All in all I was happy that the show portrayed the terrorists as three dimensional characters. And I’ll admit it did manage to not glorify the war on terror as much as I feared it would. But it still failed to ask the important questions. It failed to question the U.S. government’s methods and it failed to question whether a war on terror even makes sense in the first place (hint, my answer to that question is two letters and starts with an n).

And the last episode saddened me a great deal because it portrayed Darwyn giving in to an urge for revenge. The argument for revenge is, in my view, an easy one and one we are fed continuously. Obviously “turn the other cheek” isn’t always an answer but I really think sometimes we have to ask ourself whether revenge actually accomplishes anything. In this case I was saddened to see a character that had been buoyed throughout the show by his deep faith–which encompassed many shades of grey–fall back into the easy black and white of the an eye for an eye revenge mentality.

I suppose there’s not much point to mourning the simplicity of messages coming from TV. But ultimately when I live in a country where people legitimately believed that invading Iraq was a reasonable response to the September 11th attacks, I can’t help but think that more simplistic messages aren’t a good thing.