2005 – Page 4 – Jonathan Rowe

Open Source Kitchens

Some go to dine, others to eat. I’m an eater. I get edgy in establishments in which a meal costs more than the price of a haircut — a Chinatown haircut, — and where I have to worry about which is the proper fork. The celebrity chef thing is lost on me. The writing is just awful, too. Take the inflated prose of rock reportage a la Rolling Stone, gussy it up with Fine Arts 13 affect and society gossip, and you pretty much have the genre. Forget eating. It makes you want to barf.

A recent example is the cover story in the current New York Magazine, called, alarmingly, “The Obsessive Pursuit of the Perfect Meal: Can Jean-Georges Get His Groove Back?” (The bit of contrapuntal slang in the subhead is a giveaway. Downtown is uptown now.) It’s by Jay McInerny, who seems to do a lot of this these days. Basically, it’s about a guy by the name of Jean-Georges who was a big man with a skillet once, hung up his apron early, and now is trying a comeback.

The Bombast Tax

An old front in the campaign against public broadcasting opened up again the other day. For weeks, Kenneth Tomlinson, the Bush chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has inveighed against the left wing bias of public broadcasting, and has taken steps to impose his own right wing views. This is despite the overwhelming listener support of public radio and television.

It is not surprising that Fox News would echo Tomlinson’s views. Fox is after all a model of the “fair and balanced” reporting to which public broadcasting presumably should aspire. But a Fox reporter has offered another twist on the theme. Here’s what Scott Novell, chief of the Fox London bureau, told The Wall Street Journal on May 20th:

The Common Good

An argument for asserting our rights to quiet, community, a drink of pure water, and a breath of fresh air.

Municipal WiFi: It Started on the Farm

My mother’s second husband grew up on a farm in West Texas. He was libertine but not liberal. He railed about the men in town — a summer resort — who spent the winter on unemployment, and he thought criminals had it coming, the worse the better.. He also revered FDR. (Liberals today who don’t grasp the connection are showing why they are the minority party.)

Partly it was the farm programs that rescued many from the depths. But mainly it was public power. In Texas, as in most of the country, private utilities had bypassed rural areas because they weren’t worth serving, in the utilities’ view at least.. Too much cost, not enough potential yield. Yet these utilities guarded jealously their monopolies, and resisted efforts of legislators to serve those in need.

A Kind of Strength

Boston was a center of student activism in the 60s, and it was common to attribute this to the many colleges there, and, more vaguely, to the city’s Abolitionist past. Something less obvious was involved as well — namely, sports.

To be a kid in Boston in the 50s was to suffer the hopeless Red Sox, year after year. Not coincidentally, the Red Sox were the last team in the majors to employ a black player. In the fall, you would watch Hank Aaron and Jackie Robinson, Junior Gilliam and Willie Mays perform on the heroic stage of the World Series. The next spring, at Fenway Park, the home team would trot out another cast of plodding white guys. I know that’s a stereotype, but if you were there then you know. A fourth place finish was success. The message was not lost upon those who would become the student-citizens of the next decade.

Heavy Boots at Berkeley

What happens when faculty at a major university raise questions about a multimillion dollar research deal between a corporation and the university? And what happens to science when the search for truth becomes a quest for corporate gain? You could ask Ignacio Chapela. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, because the way things are going, there are likely to be a lot more cases like his.

Chapela, as many readers will recall, was a leader in the opposition to a $25 million deal between U-Cal Berkeley and Novartis, the Swiss biotech firm in 1998. (Novartis since has become Syngenta.) When his tenure application came up, his colleagues in the College of Natural Resources supported him by a 32-1 vote. A special tenure committee backed him unanimously.

Leave the Books Alone

It was my good fortune as a child that the local library was just a couple blocks from my elementary school. Once a week, starting in the second or third grade, our teacher would march us past the row of shops, and to the land of books. In my memory it is a brick and Tudor structure, one story, set back on a shady corner lot. Inside were long oak tables and lamps with green glass shades. The windows I think were leaded. It felt a little like a church, except more friendly and inviting.

The librarian was Mrs. Leif, who kept her glasses on a cord around her neck, and whose voice was magic. Mrs. Leif would sit at a window seat in the children’s section, and read to us. The boyhood biographies of American heroes. Charlotte’s Web. Thor, the Norse god. When she was done we were in a feeding frenzy. To this day I can remember where my favorites were — the biographies with the silhouette pictures and dense black type; the John R. Tunis baseball books; even Freddy the Pig, which was the first book of poetry I ever read and definitely the first that made me laugh.

We the Givers

Economics as practiced in the United States is a state of arrested psycho-emotional development. There is an infatuation with mechanisms and statistics — trucks and baseball cards — with little interest in the human realities and complexities that lie beneath them. There is also a solipsistic concern for the self and its desires, to the exclusion of everyone else.

That self-concern is embodied in the hypothetical person who inhabits the economics texts. It is homo economicus, the economic man, who lives according to a closed and relentless calculus of personal loss and gain. Economic man is a slug like Adam in the Garden of Eden, except that he is better at math. He has no conscience and no sense of right and wrong, only a capacity to respond to external “incentives.” His god is self-gratification; and his myopic self-seeking is what the economist calls “rationality.”

Pot and Pains

For a time I thought I might be in line for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the late 1980s, and a Reagan nominee — one Douglas Ginsberg, a district court judge — had just flamed out after the discovery that he had smoked marijuana with students when he was a professor at Harvard Law School. That got me thinking. If everyone in my generation who ever smoked pot was now disqualified – well, I just might be the last person standing.

I don’t say this with any sense of pride or virtue. I just never used the stuff. I’m contrary by nature, and my rebellion back then was not to join the rebellion — that part of it at least. I couldn’t stand the smugness that pot seemed to bring out in people. Plus I thought then, as I do now, that the way to get up the mountain is by foot.

The Personal Is Ideological

I’m looking at a letter I received last fall from the Social Security Administration. It’s a statement of my account: how much I’ve contributed, how much I will get each month when I retire, how much my family would receive if I were to die. It is a bit unsettling to see my life reduced to numbers this way. (The record of annual earnings shows why my mother once remarked to my then-girlfriend that my brother was “the practical one.”)

Still, it is comforting to know that my work has not gone unnoticed, and that a reward, however humble, awaits in my old age. I’ve been saving these statements for about five years now, ever since I was married. It never once occurred to me that they would have any significance outside my own household. Yet now they are at the center of the political brouhaha over Social Security; and specifically the attempt on one side to fence off the language commons so as to steer the debate its own way.