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Articles and Essays, Happs!, Reviews, Words & Works of Others

Urgent Recommendation: Claudia Rankine’s CITIZEN

CITIZEN: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Not racist? Hear, listen, and grasp social and race issues with the renowned author, playwright, and poet. “I don’t think we connect micro-aggressions that indicate the lack of recognition of the black body as a body to the creation and enforcement of laws.” Claudia Rankine said last fall in BOMB.
Wait, what’s a “microaggression”?? These words matter.
CITIZEN: An American Lyric divulges and dissects day-to-day, often sub-surface racism and its effects beyond the moment. Her fifth poetry book, it made history, nominated for two National Book Critics Circle Awards, for Criticism and for Poetry; it won the latter, along with the NAACP Image Award, PEN Open Book Award, and others, and is the only New York Times nonfiction bestseller of its lyric kind.
CITIZEN calls out in solidarity if you’ve ever been run into by an armored tank of racial marginalization or been caught in a nasty traffic jam of intersectionality. Rankine calls you to action if you give a hoot or are susceptible to participating in systemic racism. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant described in the BOMB interview, “Citizenship involves metabolizing in the language of your flesh what you call the ‘ordinary’ injury of racist encounter.” Rankine’s prose details scene by the millisecond, along with internal reaction, piling on inevitable, immediate, smacking social resonance in fell swoop after fell swoop. Each scene rounds out with that “metabolizing” as it happens, or as its consequence plays out within black bodies and minds constrained by white hegemony and apathy.
Los Angeles’ Fountain Theater produced an adaptation in August, spotlighting the versatility of CITIZEN and Rankine’s multi-form and -genre work. Her dialogue and descriptions came to life on stage particularly smoothly: The ensemble cast rove among different characters, black actors facing white actors, playing out scenes of surprise verbal, contextual complicity or attack and slow-motion, time-stopped response, outburst, or restraint. Sitting, watching in your red theater seat became complacency; cringing and squirming in it were not enough.
In interactions of daily and professional life, how can white people stop colluding to enact racism, even if unintentionally? How can all people not commit and not accept racial microaggression? Recognition of such words and acts is a start.

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Articles and Essays, Works in Progress

‘Oink, Oink’ becomes ‘Oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink, oink…’

Let's bring it home.

Let’s bring it home.

I am not a vegetarian, and I believe humans are mostly ultimately biologic omnivores. I have anemia and have a difficult time not eating any meat. Also, I love bacon, despite my half Hebrew heritage. I respect matanza tradition that feeds a whole community with the slaughter of a pig.

I live where many of the nation’s pigs are raised. You can smell the difference. There is a smell of rot, feces, and death when near the factory farms so pervasive in the air it makes most people gag, so thick it can make your eyes sting. Near small family-owned farms, there are just the normal smells of animals and manure. When IBP and [Tyson, &, &, &] Big Pork industrialized meat animal companies moved in to the state, they bought up family farms when the public and family farmers were not knowledgeable of their practices, until they had enough to affect the market price of pork or meat*, so that more and more small farms or family farms could not afford to keep their operations running. But the way they did that was to put TEN TIMES as many pigs into an area as was usual and considered necessary for the health and safety of the pigs. And you could smell the difference.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, incrementally increasingly, the farm-smell out in the country went from an organic manure smell (or an “eww! man-oo-er!” smell if your family is from the city like mine) to a suffocating chemical-y smell that leaves a person feeling sick. This is partly because there is so much more feces in the same amount of space. Well, pee-yew! But besides simple city-slicker nose wrinkling, there is more sulfur, and the waste cannot be treated the same way. These companies use unsafe methods of dealing with the magnitude of animal waste to turn it into manure or dealing with what cannot be turned into manure: see the viral FactoryFarmDrones.com.

Even in relatively smaller family farm operations, because they must buy in to the pork industry methods to make a living, and they use hog confinement to raise pigs for meat, the danger is fatal. Hog confinement is deadly to humans. It has killed four farmers in one month alone in the hog livestock states.

These companies often purposely ignore the rules of pigs allowed per square foot, because the fine or citation or cost of sanction is affordable to them. Additionally, the rules grew more lax on allowances for treatment of animals and health, safety, and sanitation measures for sickness or deaths per capita, dealing with feces, disposing of dead animals, etc. because these companies intensely and forcefully lobby congress–whereas family farmers did not have such political power, but struggled until in order to continue farming or {continue} making a living, each farmer or family would be econmically forced to either sell the land and lease it back to continue running it–under the new rules of meat industry’s company in the area, just like Big Ag and sharecroppers. Nowadays, often the company fully owns the animals and the farmer raises them or “leases” the animals from the company, originally often involving selling the family’s livestock to the company and “leasing” them back to raise them.

*Industrial livestock animal companies also alter the price in behind-the-scenes stock market and finance industry deals or political negotiations. They use other political tactics, too**, muddying the environmental cause with corruption and essentially not just victim-blaming but economically crushing the family farm, yet again.

Meat is infused with the anti-bacterials the livestock animals must be given just to survive in such close quarters and uncomfortable [worse than] sparse [worse than] cold metal pens. Meat is infused with Red #40 that causes sterility. Brits in the U.S. can taste the formaldehyde in the ground beef.

Last but not least, pigs are as smart or smarter than dogs.

Oh, wait, they’re *&%$ing delicious. Then use a local/family hog-raising farm. Save up for eating it if that’s what it takes. Hey, even if you love swine or meat, there’s no need to eat meat for every meal. In fact, eating less of it from having to buy the expensive local, well-fed, humanely treated meat actually means your meat tastes better because less fear and less infection and not living in your own feces your whole life gives that more satisfied pig better meat, for a more satisfied human.


Some o' my sources:
**Here's a poultry example.
Iowa farm independent film from 2011 (on Big Ag corn?) screened in conjunction with local sustainably-sourced food organization
Applied Animal Behaviour journal's article on cows
"Inside a pig farm" video by Animal Equality, via their Facebook page

PIC: http://www.freeimages.com/photo/1381013
Updated 07/28/2015

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Articles and Essays, Works in Progress

Facebook Satisfaction Survey Response: Dissatisfied with Privacy and Grieving over Social Experiments

Facebook Satisfaction Survey Response: Dissatisfied with Privacy and Social Experiments

I don’t like how difficult it is to figure out what can be seen by networks of people. I don’t like that even when a user sets something to only be seen by “Friends” network, for instance, or “Custom” select people, the post is not taken out of others’ NewsFeeds.

This is an issue in the “other” direction in a way, too–but primarily still an issue with the user not knowing how what is private or not works, and not having control or what is private or not private been set by or even *known* by the user:

I don’t like the algorithms where Facebook decides what a user sees of the user’s Friends or Networks, and of whom, in NewsFeed. Right while/after Facebook was “experimenting” with only showing people what some unknown person or group internally of Facebook (????kept undisclosed) were “happy” posts, I noticed that posts a young, troubled friend of mine were posting appeared on my friend’s profile page wall that I had not seen in my NewsFeed.  These were troubled posts…so I had not seen or known that my friend was having *so* much trouble. We use Facebook to keep in touch, to communicate, to know what’s going on with each other. When someone posts on Facebook with an open-privacy post, to Public, or sets the post to Friends or certain networks, the user–and the users friends and networks–are expecting it to be visible…available…in NewsFeed, and noticeable esp. when a person logs in or looks at Facebook at the time of or shortly thereafter a user posts. If I had seen these posts as they happened…as would be the case more so had they been in my NewsFeed as usual, and as expected, without those “experiments” on withholding posts that were deemed not “positive” or “happy” for a “happier” experience on Facebook…I would have interacted differently with my friend, and sooner, and responded to such posts, or contacted my friend some other way sooner. My young friend, troubled and posting about it to express herself, killed herself.  She expressed where she knew others could see, a form of reaching out, posting where she was under the impression others would see…her friends whom she was often too embarrassed to show weakness to in other ways or forms would see, her friends and mentors whom she expected to see these posts and to whom this was the most dignified way she could reach out…. But her posts did not reach our eyes as we expected, under and for the undisclosed purposes of purported and UNWITTING and NON-CONSENSUAL psychosocial experimenting by Facebook.

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