A zodiac is a small, relatively high-powered, ocean-going boat, which entered the popular imagination primarily because Jacques Cousteau used them. They have a hard hull and big, soft, inflatable inner tube like sides. Zodiacs are the kind of relatively simple, fairly inexpensive, highly-effective and versatile tool that occasionally gets made and recognized. They’re fast and maneuverable and useful for getting people around quickly and easily in the ocean over fairly short distances. I rode in one in British Columbia, 17 years ago, to go whale watching; they haven’t changed a lot since then.

For Sangamon Taylor (or just S.T.), protagonist of Zodiac (Neal Stephenson, 1988) and veteran environmental activist, a zodiac is the best way around Boston, a superb tool for harassing toxic chemical producers, and a thrill a minute. In between getting drunk and sucking down large quantities of nitrous oxide, S.T. works against pollution by embarrassing corporations and politicians and, occasionally, by physically plugging industrial waste outflows, thereby at least temporarily shutting down a plant. He is well-known in environmental circles and infamous in the business world. S.T. is young and brash; when he’s working on a job and gets tired enough, he pops a couple tabs of LSD to keep him up. Regardless of his habits, he’s also pretty smart.

Zodiac is about S.T. and his investigation of and fight with one particular pollution problem. It’s told entirely from his perspective and, aside from a few side trips representative of S.T.’s somewhat distractible personality, the story stays focused and moves along well. Written by a young man about a young man, the novel has all the strengths, pleasures, and faults of young men in the U.S. It was a pleasant distraction for me, a break from more thought-provoking reading. In trying to look past the hubris and bravado, I see a lesson about the satisfaction and effectiveness of direct action in politics. What it lacks in profoundness, the book makes up for in fun.

Phillip K. Dick lived from 1928 to 1982. During his almost 54 years, he wrote 44 novels that have been published, mostly science fiction. All of Dick’s books that I’ve read are concerned with the nature of reality, how we know what reality is, and being manipulated to believe in false realities. Frequently there are more-or-less secret realities underneath or parallel to the surface reality that his books’ characters and readers take for granted.

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was published in 1986 by the estate of Phillip K. Dick. The writing is dry. It’s one of the more matter of fact, plain spoken novels I’ve read. Its non-directed story seems to be going nowhere in a mundane, regular life kind of way. And then, near the end, our understanding of the story is severely questioned; I was left uncertain about what was true and what was fantasy, which I think is exactly what Dick wanted.

Read this book if you are a serious Dick fans or if you are from the Bay Area and enjoy recognizing your home in stories.

In Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), Colson Whitehead continues to demonstrate his novelistic brilliance with a very funny poke at capitalism, public framing, marketing, and their interrelations. With subtlety and wit, Whitehead discusses the impact of branding, names, and naming on our individual and collective psyches. As always, and reflective of the U.S. cultural reality, the entire brew is spiced with considerations of race and class and gender.

I get the sense that this is the stuff of Whiteheads consciousness. He’s walking around thinking about the stories we’re told to explain our places in the world—by everyone from our parents to novelists to marketing consultants (and the overlaps of them all)—and the stories we make up to do the same. That he’s able to share his sensibility, and in such clever, pleasing prose, is a boon to us all. Entertaining and thought-provoking, he could only improve by helping us understand where to go from where we are now. As evidenced by the book’s ending, which is less than satisfying, either he doesn’t know the way out of the cultural decline that he observes or he’s not willing to tell. My guess is the former.

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

In 2004, it was easy to moan about how strong the neo-conservative movement in the United States was. The war against gay marriage, abortion, and other social/cultural issues was raging and the neo-cons seemed to be winning—witness the fact that George W. Bush was reelected that year on a platform that consisted of almost nothing except the failures of his first term and the idea that he was somehow of the common people.

This is exactly what journalist and writer Thomas Frank does in What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004), using his home state of Kansas as the poster child of confused, misguided voting in the U.S., voting by the poor and working class against their economic self-interest. His main questions: why, in Kansas (and, by extension, all over the country), would farmers, blue-collar workers, and poor people, in general—historically faithful Democratic voters—vote Republican, supporting the corporate takeover of their family farms, the Wal-Martizing of their local businesses, and the reduction of taxes for the wealthiest? Why would the people that need the most help getting by support reducing the amount of health care, education, and other public services?

The answer, unsurprising to those that have read George Lakoff, is values. Thomas makes the case that the neo-conservatives have used wedge issues social issues like abortion, gun control, and evolution/creationism—racial and xenophobic fear is notably absent from his list, but I would certainly add them—to polarize the traditionally Democratic base. The ironic thing about these reasons for voting Republican, as Thomas points out, is that little is ever actually accomplished on those issues. The neo-cons run on a platform of social outrage and moral uprightness, but spend their time in office busting unions, cutting taxes, deregulating industries, and gutting our public school system.

Thomas is a thorough researcher, but most of the book is an anecdotal rant, a head-shaking “can you believe this really happened?” What’s missing is the kind of organizing scheme that Lakoff provides, a lack that left me feeling little wiser after reading the book. Nevertheless, Thomas makes some important points. Primary among them: “Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.” The lack of clearly articulated progressive vision, combined with liberal politicians’ concessions to Wall Street and the rich, have impoverished the left and the country has paid the price with 8 years of neo-cons in the White House.

A year after Obama’s election, it feels like we’ve started to recover from those dark days. However, the economic policy debates are still largely framed like they have been since the 1980s. Progress on social issues, incremental as it is, is great, but does little, if anything, to change the economic conditions, distribute wealth and prosperity to all people, and improve health care and education. Only by reframing the issues so that most people see real change as beneficial to them and in line with their values can we move forward to create more justice and equity in our society.

No it’s not all about race, but it’s a lot about race. Check out Wise’s writing on the issue--cogent, insightful, and well-researched, as usual.

Check out this Newsweek article. Aside from the interesting studies on children and their behavior, the article points to what seems obvious to me, but apparent isn’t to many: white people don’t talk about race enough and pretending that race doesn’t exist as a social reality actually perpetuates its existence.

Check out the cool list of “Mindblowing SF by Women and People of Color” at Tor.com.

Thanks to Alisa for the heads up.

My younger brother and I were brought up as Seventh Day Adventists, a fundamentalist sect founded in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century. I left that church relatively early, but my brother remains very involved. He’s an accountant and, while he doesn’t adhere entirely to Adventist dogma and will discuss most issues with an open mind, he usually falls on the conservative side. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect he votes largely Republican.

This summer, I went to Minnesota to see my brother’s two sons, 12 and 14, get baptized. On Saturday after church, my family joined a group of locals at the side of a small river for the ceremony, which my nephews seemed to take quite seriously. We sang some hymns and prayed and the pastor said a few words welcoming the boys into the church community.

My family used the occasion as an excuse to have a family reunion of sorts. Other than the baptism, we spent the entire weekend laying about, making and eating food, playing games, and generally enjoying each other’s company.

In the midst of all this my little brother gave me Little Brother (Cory Doctorow, 2008), saying something mellow and innocuous like, “I think you might like this.” I not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what I got.

Little Brother is about a young man in high school in San Francisco in the present/near future. He and three friends are techie geeks and participate in complex games that integrate fantasy, technology, and the regular mundane world in ways that promote superb problem solving skills and strong group loyalty, as well as strange public behavior. Adept at avoiding the high-tech tracking and observation that infest their high schools and, to some degree, their city, these youths are bright, motivated, and highly skilled. When, early in the story, their lives are severely disrupted by a terrorist attack, their city and country are propelled into even more paranoia than that with which our society currently suffers. The Department of Homeland Security descends on the Bay Area and the rest of the story is about what happens to the teens and how they respond.

Doctorow sees one of his primary messages to be about privacy, especially digital and internet privacy. There’s an after word in which he talks about online security, encryption, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and more. Identify theft, data mining by the government and/or corporate entities, digital spying, and other forms of privacy invasion are serious issues. And for me they aren’t the real issues framing this story.

For me Little Brother is about “Big Brother” (from Orwell’s classic, 1984). It’s about government authority and liberty and fear and xenophobia and the ways that our country’s conservative leaders manipulate our society to fit their authoritarian worldview, lining their own and their friends’ pockets along the way. Doctorow’s ideas are a pretty natural extension of the direction George W. Bush was taking our country: unending foreign wars, spying on citizens, racial profiling, immigration injustice, holding people indefinitely without charge, torture, and privatization of it all. The big losers were citizens, especially low-income populations and people of color; the winners were corporations and those that controlled them.

I was confused for a while about why my brother suggested I read this story, because its message seemed to run counter to his politics. Then I remembered the paranoia about the end of time in my Adventist upbringing. That religion’s vision of the Earth’s last days includes harsh persecution for anyone who doesn’t go to church on Sunday; Seventh Day Adventists will be outlawed and, unable to work or even buy food, forced into the hills to survive. Perhaps my brother saw in the novel an explanation of how our society might descend into religious persecution and all the worst fears of our childhood. Of course, this explanation is needed only if we think there’s no religious or other persecution in this country already. Sadly, our nation, supposedly founded partially to protect religious and other cultural rights, has a long history of genocide, racial injustice, social and economic inequality, and religious discrimination. Current practice is little better—it’s dangerous to be Muslim in the U.S. today, just to name one target of oppression.

Little Brother brings up all this for me. Though written for a young adult audience, the story rarely, if ever, wallows in the teenage angst that often makes the genre unbearable. It’s a page-turner, yet the book’s potential to provoke a critical look at our democracy gives it a weight not found in many a more “serious” work. Thanks, little brother.

I realize I’m way behind the curve here, but I just stumbled on SparkTests and took the Personality Test. It has me as:

A DREAMER (Submissive Introverted Abstract Feeler) — reserved and imaginative. You are basically the shy, silent type. You don’t have much interest in facts and figures or most of what’s going on around you, but the internal worlds you build for yourself are rich and complex. Luckily, your creativity and strong heart mean you have a deep personality evident to anyone who gets to know you. It’s just that not many people do. Talk to yourself less, other people more.

Considering what I do for a living and my life in general, I think this has missed me pretty substantially. Nevertheless, taking the test was fun; it has some interesting questions. They also have a lot of other tests: Death, Gender, Jerk, Unintelligence, and more.