First, the new website is entirely available in English. The old version seemed to have an English veneer that quickly gave way to French pages as one dug deeper into the site.

Second, and far more importantly, it is now possible to buy Vélib’ passes online using US credit cards. The credit card swipe thing at the actual kiosks still requires a card with a chip in it (so a Canadian or European-style credit card), but you can e-commerce your way to a one-day, one-week, or yearly pass with your old style American MasterCard or Visa. This finally makes Vélib’ wholly accessible to the American community. Of course, this now means that I no longer have to send a check and RIB in to renew my yearly account, too. Welcome to the glorious Twenty-First Century!

Third, the price structure for the annual plan has changed. As the site notes, there are now four schedules for annual plans. What used to cost 29€ and be the only available option is now called “Vélib’ Classic,” but there is a “Passion” upgrade for 10€ more. Paris is more or less entirely crossable in 45 minutes (north-south), making the Passion upgrade rather tantalizing for big commuters. There are also two options, at lower price points, for students.

Fourth, Vélib’ has raised the prices of the 1-day and 7-day tickets. What used to cost 1€ and 5€ now cost, respectively, 1.70€ and 8€. These prices are still, of course, ludicrously cheap, and now there is no reason not to unleash a massive wave of tourists on these bicycles.

——

This all said, I have started to feel the pinch of Vélib’ and have learned to appreciate what a fragile ecosystem it actually is. The station nearest me, which held about 50 bikes, was closed in the spring, so that work could be done on the street. It has still not reopened. At first, I was able to reliably get a bike at a station just a bit farther away, but then that station became empty in the morning. This emptiness has spread from station to station such that now, the nearest station to me that has bicycles in the morning is over 600m away.

Since the tram, on the other hand, is a mere 50m away, one can imagine how a certain laziness has set in, where I give up and pay the 1.20€ (or whatever it is) to ride the tram to work. I understand that 600m is not a terrible distance to walk, but it does add time to the commute, and it further shows that, for some reason, my neck of Paris, which used to be reliably served by bicycles, is now a bit of a wasteland. I don’t know how it is elsewhere at 9am, but I know that it was not like this before, so, basically, cry cry, I want my old station back.

Immediately, out came the haters. But Ravi’s two points are worth addressing: population density counts for something, as does bus access, right? Fine. But, most markedly, I’m explicitly not asking about transportation access as a whole. To do that would then also involve bringing in questions of commuting and the like–and I only coded Parisian (and near Parisian) Métro stops, not the system as a whole, and I only measured my Chicago maps for Chicago, not Chicagoland. It goes on. My question was simple: no matter where I am in Paris, what’s the furthest I am from a Métro station? The answer is about 700m. What would that same number look like in Chicago? This then explains why in Chicago I seldom feel close to an El stop, whereas in Paris, the Métro is unavoidable. So I was explicitly not asking the questions Ravi asked. And I’d argue that I didn’t ask them since they don’t change the answer.

So let’s tackle population density: First, in my area calculations of Paris, I included the two huge forests. “No one” lives there. If you take the forests out, then basically all of Paris is within 700m of a Métro station. That was the point of the initial exercise, and that’s why I’m hung up on this dumb number of 700m. So there you are: about 2.2 million of a possible 2.2 million Parisians live within 700m of a Métro station. The number of Chicagoans is, clearly, different. Some percentage of the possible 2.6 million Chicagoans live within 700m of an El stop. I’m going to guess that it’s not 100%. I’m going to guess it’s not even 84%, which would yield 2.2 million Chicagoans, making the number equivalent to Parisians. Whatever the number is, it’s much, much lower, as is evident from any acquaintance with Chicago. So even if I cut out O’Hare, the Stockyards, the Port, Beverly, whatever, it’s still simply not the case that everyone lives in the teeny little disks on the Chicago map. My point, however, is that everyone does live in the teeny disks in Paris. In that case, this is all self-evident: Paris is denser than Chicago in terms of population and train station coverage. Cheers.

As for the bus question, I’m not a crook explaining Chicago’s terrible transportation coverage in order to sell you a monorail. I’m making a comparison between like modes of transit. As I responded, in Chicago the bus system is obviously there, in part, to cover up massive holes in El coverage (as well as provide redundancy). As in, it’s evident that the bus goes to places that the trains just don’t. But saying that “Chicago ain’t that bad. We got buses, too!” is not the answer here, since even if El + bus + Metra provides public transit within 700m of everyone in the city, Paris manages a similar level of coverage with just a subway system.¹ If you add in the buses & trams, then public transportation becomes ubiquitous in Paris. Taking note, then, of the density of the bus system within the city, which runs not redundantly with the Métro, it’s possible that we start hitting numbers like 250m when it comes to the question of “how close is public transportation at all times?”

Five Parisian commutes. (click to enlarge)

Which brings me back to what spurred this little investigation: the anecdotal feeling that public transportation has a profile in Paris that it simply does not have in Chicago. I don’t think there exists a “what about…?” that makes my anecdotal suspicion turn out to be wrong. It’s just a question of how right it is.

Also, I can only get population data at the Arrondissement level for Paris, which is probably not terribly interesting.

Finally, for fun, I close with this quick little Google Map I made of the five possible commutes I can take between home and work. The shortest distance, in blue, is the walk. It is about 4.35km and takes me about 50 minutes. I could also take the 62 bus along most of the same route. It would shave time off the total, but I don’t know how much; I don’t time myself when I take it. The next shortest is the bike ride, which is in green and 4.55km in length. It takes less than 20 minutes. The more commonly taken bus solution for me is the T3 tram with a transfer at Porte d’Ivry to the PC2 bus. It’s aqua on the map. It takes less than 40 minutes and runs 4.96km.

Next are the two Métro solutions: in pink is taking the M4 from Porte d’Orléans to Saint-Michel and switching to the RER C to go to Bibliothèque Nationale. It takes over a half hour and runs 9.95km. I can’t believe that there was a time when this was my daily commute. Finally, in purple, is the University’s recommended commute, which involves taking the RER B from Cité Universitaire to Châtelet and swtiching to the M14 to Bibliothèque Nationale. It also takes over a half hour and runs 10.35km. Anyone who knows me well knows what kind of existential pain these last two commute options bring, but they do serve to make my ancillary point about the Parisian bus system: it’s there to cover up holes in the Métro system, which already doesn’t have much in the way of holes. But, yes, getting from the southern edge of the city to the southeastern edge can be tricky if you don’t have recourse to the bus or tram.

1. I think it is probably the case in Chicago that one is rather close to a bus at all times, considering that Chicago buses tend to run on the grid at half-mile increments. That means that you can expect to be .25mi (or 400m) from a bus at all times.

Vélib’ coverage in Paris. (click to enlarge / make useful)

When I made my Paris Métro map, the joke was that the next step would be the leap in order of magnitude between subway stations and Vélib’ stations. For those who don’t know what Vélib’ is, it’s the Parisian bike-sharing system that I’ve already described in great detail. But I knew there was no way that I would hand geocode each station (there are over 1200 of them), so I put the affair off. But this morning, I wondered if I could possibly reverse engineer a list from snooping around the Google Maps widget that Vélib’ offers. This widget I use every morning when deciding where I’ll get my bike and where I’ll park it. Luckily, a bit of sleuthery led to this XML file, which has the latitude and longitude of each station.

Once I’ve got that, the rest is kids’ play. Parse, parse, plot, plot. And now I’ve got this map here, which is so busy and full of information that it’s nearly impossible to understand. But one thing is certain: my initial guess was that one was hardly ever more than 350m from a Vélib’ station. That turns out to be about true. Not including the two Parisian forests, there are only handfuls of areas within Paris itself that are more than 400m from a Vélib’ station. It’s a remarkable amount of coverage that makes me realize how outrageously extensive this project was (and continues to be).

Still, there were a few kinks in the data that I found worth a remark. Two stations, 20018 and 20048, both in the 20th Arrondissement, had latitudes and longitudes that were, well, identical, and, also, in Algeria, prompting more than just me to make jokes about racist civil servants in the Mairie. What’s interesting, further, is that neither of the two stations appear on StreetView (I’m not about to bike up to the 20th to check in person). One, 20048, is marked on OpenStreetMap at the proper address, 110 rue de Bagnolet. The other, however, is listed at 2 rue Hartignies, which does not seem to exist. There is a 2 rue Harpignies in the 20th, but there is no Vélib’ station there on OpenStreetMap. Now if you go to the Vélib’ Google Maps widget and type in either station number, it will take you to Algeria and tell you that bikes are available there. Is this an error? Maybe. Is it coding trickery to prevent copying, along the lines of a trap street? Also possible.

Vélib’ wastelands in Paris. (click for Google Maps interactive)

Back to the coverage, though. In short, the map is so dense that I decided to experiment a bit further, so I created a shapefile featuring only the places in Paris that were more than 250m from a Vélib’ station. I then converted it to a KMZ, and you can open it in Google Maps by clicking here. I’m a bit proud of this interactive little Google Maps thing, so please have some fun with it, if you like. I used a quickly drawn outline of Paris for the clip shape, so it’s not a perfect fit to the Maps interface, but we can notice a few things right away about Vélib’ coverage in Paris proper. First, if you’re in a forest, you’re more or less completely out luck. This makes sense. Also, if you are in the middle of a railyard, you probably are rather far from a Vélib’ station. Most of the swaths along the northern edge of the city, as with Métro patches, are devoted to trains racing out of the city, so it’s not terribly necessary to have bikes where only trains go.

But I find it more interesting that along the Seine, it is hardest to find a Vélib’ stand where tourists are most likely to be: between the Louvre and the Palais Royal as well as near the Eiffel Tower. It’s not a complete dead zone, of course.¹ All of Champs de Mars is within 400m of a Vélib’ stand, and only a teeny bit of the park by Trocadero is more than 400m from a stand. But, still, Vélib’ing is trickier if you’re engaged in touristy activities, which is, actually, only fair. Vélib’ is useful for tourists, and they can use it all they want, but it should not be (and obviously was not) designed with the tourist in mind. The rest of the patches within the city largely correspond to either parks, railways, or hospitals.

I will close out this post with a link to a short presentation on the French ESRI site about Vélib’, which shows what a huge GIS project this was, involving planning at massively different levels of scale, such that the system works exactly as it should, despite a huge population in constant transit with shifting demands. Hopefully I’ll be able to supplement my own maps here in the future with Parisian demographic data or something else entirely.

1. Of course, Saint Michel and Hôtel de Ville do not suffer for lack of Vélib’ stands. My imagination says that the tourists drift more westward, though, once they have seen Notre Dame.

El coverage in Chicago (click to enlarge).

The last time I rapped at you, I talked about Métro coverage in Paris. I felt like Paris was exceptionally well covered by the Métro, and I used math to prove that basically one is never more than 700m from a Métro station in the city. How, though, does that coverage compare with Chicago? Would you be surprised if I said that Chicago ends up looking rather awful in comparison? How much worse, would you guess? If 700m is the maximum in Paris, what would you guess is the maximum distance from an el stop in Chicago? 1km? 2km? More?

After wrangling a bit with the GIS data available from the city itself as well as the CTA data from Steven Vance, I can build a simple buffer map much like the Paris map from the previous exercise, and the results? They ain’t pretty.

It is a bloodbath, in fact. Whereas in the previous exercise, the buffers were 250, 500, and 700m from the Métro, In this map on this post, the buffers are 1, 2.5, and 5km from the stop. In other words, everything that is dark purple is between 2.5 and 5km from a CTA El stop. Areas that are tan are parts of Chicago that are over 5km from a CTA El stop. But even if we just look at the 2.5km discs, we see that what feels like a third of the South Side is abandoned when it comes to the El. Pullman, Beverly, Rainbow Beach. All these neighborhoods are, literally, miles from the El. Even the parts of Hyde Park east of the Metra tracks (hot pink) are over 2.5km from the Green Line.

Ah, but what about the Metra, then? Surely some of these coverage gaps can be accounted for with the Metra, right? OK, let’s add them, as I included RER stations in my Métro map. And, fair enough, once you add in the Metra, nearly none of Chicago is more than 2.5km from a train station of some sort (dark blue for CTA, dark green for Metra). But, still, I’m using largely inflated scales for these maps to try and get something like the coverage of Paris. So, as a final map, I’ll dial the buffers back down to Parisian size: 250m, 500m, and 750m, just so you can compare, side-by-side, Parisian coverage with Chicagoan coverage.

Métro coverage in Paris (click to enlarge).

Anecdotally, I have felt since moving to Paris that one is never, ever too far from a Métro station. This is in contrast with Chicago, where one can be literally over a mile from an El stop. But I had not, until now, measured it out. Similarly, last year, a friend, who was living in the 18th, asserted that where he was living was the farthest one could live within Paris from a Métro station. I wondered if he was right, and, if not, where one would actually live to earn that distinction.

Enter Quantum GIS. Not having an ArcGIS license last year, I decided to try and use FOSS tools to answer these questions, but I couldn’t get the software to play nice.¹ One more year has elapsed without an ArcGIS license, but in the meantime I have learned to control qGIS a bit better. So despite the fact that this question is over a year old, it’s only recently that I’ve been able to return to it.

First, the data. It comes from the nightly collection of OSM data available for download at Geofabrik. I then added the Métro stations by hand. I only added stations within Paris, though I included a few just outside the city if I thought they might affect the results. For the purposes of this map, the projection is the NTF (Paris) / Lambert zone I.

Second, the buffering. The lightest buffer is 250m. The middle buffer is 500m. The dark buffer is 700m. In other words, everything that is white and within the Périphérique (vaguely visible as the dark highway in the map surrounding the subway stations) is more than 700m from a Métro station.

Yet it’s interesting to look at those white sections in greater detail: in the southern part of the city, those points are all served by the T3 tram. So if I had included it (I didn’t since you can’t transfer for free with a t+ ticket between the Métro/RER and the tram), they would stop being white. Furthermore, some of that white space is covered by sports fields and cemeteries. The tiny white triangle on the south side with the RER B rail running right through, however, is part of my daily commute. It is right by the huge Sainte-Anne Hospital. The white square on the eastern edge of the city is right by the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. I’ve been around there before, and, well, let’s just say that I quickly understood that I had to take a bus to get home. The wedge in the north, where the rails from Gare de l’Est start bending eastward, features industrial railyard-type stuff. Like much of the edge of the city on the north and south, it is decidedly not residential.

So basically, one can assert with confidence that there’s nearly no chance that one lives more than 700m from a Métro stop in Paris. If one lives in an Arrondissement that is only one digit, there is nearly no chance that one lives more than 500m from a Métro stop. In fact, the only places in the first 10 Arrondissements that are more than 500m from a Métro stop are: right in the middle of Champ de Mars, in the Seine near Quai d’Orsay, the area surrounding the Église du Val-de-Grâce, and the block between the canal and the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

The Métro is everywhere, Paris is ridiculously well-covered, and I’m glad I’m finally figuring out qGIS.

Next up: Vélib’? Maybe. Not really. Actually really.

1. Specifically, I was having lots of trouble getting the data to project correctly. I still don’t have as good a grasp of projection as I do in ArcGIS, but at least I seem capable of reprojecting data.

At the outset he claims to have gone “all out” with not eating meat, like me. I would hardly consider myself “all out.” First, I’m not a vegan, despite having been a vegan for a few stretches of a few months. Second, I’m generally a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”-type of vegetarian. At restaurants, I’ll avoid food that I can nearly guarantee has meat in it (nearly every soup unless it says otherwise), and if there’s a large doubt, I’ll ask. But I won’t push the issue to demand separate cooking spaces, etc. There are people who do that, and I respect their decision, but though I’m against meat contamination, the main thrust of my not eating meat has to do with reducing consumption.¹

The first question Aras asks is about the ethics of throwing away already owned meat instead of eating it. Everyone approaches this differently. When I stopped eating meat, there was still tons of meat in my mom’s house, and none of it got thrown away. In fact, there still manages to be a ton of meat in her house that doesn’t get thrown away. If Aras included his whole family in his scheme, then it was simply a peculiar scheme, that I’ll return to below.²

The next question has to do with eating at a formal event. Basically, Arai, it does suck. That’s the life of being a vegetarian in the Western (or, in the case of Vilnius, wannabe Western) world. You are nearly always an inconvenience, especially to extended family members who keep forgetting your dietary restrictions. Before any big dinner function (wedding reception, say), I’ve gotten into a habit of eating a meal on my own, since I know that the bread and salad at the table won’t be able to compete with the night’s drinking afterward. I have fond memories of sitting in a parking lot in Rosemont, IL, eating a stuffed spinach pizza from Edwardo’s by myself to prepare for a Šokių Šventė banketas.³

Airlines are getting better about serving vegetarian food, by offering it as one of the main choices, instead of as a special dish, though there are certain limitations.⁴ Banquet halls are also getting better, but we’re still a far ways away from being normative. When Medieval Times offers a vegetarian meal that isn’t steamed vegetables with a cup of melted butter, I’ll know things are ok.⁵

This bends into Aro next question, of “if real vegetarians are ever caught so off guard.” No, we aren’t, since we understand that we live lives that are, despite increasing visibility, outside of the mainstream. I know to eat before a wedding reception. I know to bring snacks aboard an airplane. It’s like having a game or something ready with which to occupy your child when you’re about to embark on something that will test her patience. You anticipate and prepare, two verbs that are central to any adult’s vocabulary. And you enjoy being surprised when you’ve overprepared.

And sometimes it means not being a part of a certain social circle, or understanding that you can never fully be a part of a certain social event. For example, I love my friends, but I’m sick of going to barbecues at their houses. No matter how many delicious “sides” there are and how full I can get off them, we can’t escape the fact that the centerpiece of the event, and what the host usually prides him or herself with the most, is a giant slab of carefully, lovingly prepared meat. Similarly, my friends in Chicago go to a rodízio every year. I simply decline the invitation, since $40 for an all you can eat salad bar (and it is a good one!) is an obscenity.

But, considering how scarce meat was in the western world until about a century ago, and how scarce it continues to be throughout much of the world, an all you can eat meat buffet (as well as a night devoted to pushing the limits of said buffet) is its own obscenity.

Finally Aras brings the issue to Vilnius and about being a vegetarian there. I’m not as much of an expert on this topic as Ed (who eats fish) or my friend Veronika, who has been a militant vegetarian for the near decade she’s lived in Vilnius, but I do know a few things.

First off, there are certain cuisines/restaurants one simply avoids. The rodízio is one example. German restaurants and French bistros are another. These culinary cultures are simply not accepting of vegetarian lifestyles, and one anticipates this in advance. When I go to a French restaurant in Paris, I know that I will either be eating some kind of omelette or a pair of measly “entrées” (sides) while my friends go to work on half a pig. It’s funny that Aras specifically mentions Bravaria, since it was another German restaurant in Vilnius I was planning to go to over the summer until my suspicions (there won’t be anything there I can eat) were confirmed by the menu on the web.

Next, one learns of places that do have decent vegetarian meals, without having to resort to going to Balti drambliai all the time. Briusly and Beirut (while it stays open!) both offer multiple vegetarian dishes of astonishingly good quality. Sue’s has an even more expansive (and expensive) menu. Even my over-maligned Tres mexicanos serves its vegetarian clients multiple dishes (I think there are five things on their menu one can order without meat without ordering it specially).

But even local Lithuanian cuisine, based as it is on farmers who were too poor for meat, has greasy, starchy, non-meat alternatives, making places like Čili kaimas or Amatininkų užeiga perfectly fine dining options. Furthermore, the crêpe/blini/blynai culture of Eastern Europe gives both sweet and savory options that never even come near meat. One won’t convince me that Теремок in Moscow has a tastier thing on the menu than their “Блин ‘E-mail.’” So it’s not the case that because Vilnius lacks “vegetarian restaurants,” it’s difficult for a vegetarian out there. In fact, I never felt particularly without a place to eat, unlike in Paris, where one can get sick of cheese omelettes. Furthermore, Vilnius is much more amenable to drinking and dining than the US is, where usually if I’m out drinking with friends, I’m limited to pub food (read: nachos, french fries, or something else deep-fried).

So what’s the crux of my response to Aro post? Something about how being a vegetarian is not personally terribly difficult, but it does still have a non-trivial social cost, one that Aras felt in passing, remarked upon, and then abandoned, since, for him, this was merely a one-month experiment. I, for example, and Aras has witnessed this personally, try by all means to weasel out of dinner parties, knowing that I’m, simply put, a pain in the ass. Most people I know are not used to preparing vegetarian dishes (or considering the extremely wide array of non-meat dishes outside of omelettes and pasta), so I know I’m a burden when they invite me over. Some families, like Aro, I’ve learned are up for the task. But I can’t hold it against my stepfamily for not being similarly adventurous.

I have friends who abandon their vegetarianism when it’s polite to do so. I certainly do many, many things out of politeness only, and I used to eat shellfish this way. It took my mom about three Christmas dinners before she remembered I don’t even eat shellfish anymore, so I politely ate the stuff, especially since I saw how proud she was of the effort she went through to make a dish just for me. But these days, I would simply refuse, as I simply can’t eat shellfish anymore. It grosses me out, as does all animal flesh. When I tackled vegetarianism here last, I wrote that going back to meat is simply not an option anymore. This isn’t an experiment; it’s a way of life.

This whole post I have avoided trying to compare the social cost of not eating meat with the social cost of being a recovering alcoholic. There are obviously vital differences I can’t even begin to imagine. Yet I find it slightly instructive that it’s the example I kept wanting to return to. You’re a person who, for whatever reason, is cut off from what remains a vital social component of your cultural life. And you also know that there is no going back–no returning to that cultural life. All you can do is wait for everyone to join you, pretty much, to wait for culture to change. It’s not worth it (or even the case, for me) to feel sorry for yourself about the differences. You just anticipate and prepare, over and over.

1. On the other hand, I generally don’t “eat around meat,” which Aras did during his experiment.
2. On a side note, I would certainly not choose a winter month for an experiment in vegetarianism, unless it’s an experiment on “how bad can things get?” The variety of food available in the wintertime is much lower, and that’s felt acutely by vegetarians. I’m glad I’m not yet sick of potato leek soup.
3. Friends were jealous when I later told them what I ate for dinner, when they compared it to their rubber chicken. Of course, I also paid the $50 or whatever for food I didn’t eat. Thinking about functions in that way is an exercise in madness. If I considered a banquet ticket to include the price of the food, I’d never go to another banquet again.
4. This truly is tragic. American Airlines used to offer a vegan meal, a vegetarian meal, and a Hindu meal. Despite how impossible it is to get in a special meal request with them, the Hindu meal was always fantastically aromatic in comparison to the steak and potatoes everyone else would eat. AA apparently drew some Venn diagrams, however, and collapsed all three into a simple vegan meal that I’ve never found particularly exciting. Too bad!
5. The fact that during the epoch the restaurant celebrates pretty much no one on Earth ate meat with any regularity causes the vegetarian option to serve as a complete insult.

[Anti-racism and anti-sexism] currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class.

I bring this up to remark upon the surprise I felt when I noticed that only one other student besides me raised her hand. I was pretty certain that in a class of 30 English lit grad students, there’d be more than two who were children of doctors.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve been intrigued by many of the debates about the gutting of humanities funding either at SUNY Albany or in England, as part of the Lord Browne Report. Martin McQuillan’s piece, which I made my class of French undergrads read, talks about how by turning its back on funding the humanities, the state is leaving the study of such things to just the rich. The humanities are being privatized, he warns.

Even more pithily, on the humanist list, Alexander Hay worries:

I fear the worst case scenario will be the most likely one: Most people will go to university to do a vocational degree in the vain hope this is how they get a job, whilst the Humanities and Social Sciences wither on the vine until they become something only rich, privileged people do.

My reaction to this was… isn’t that already the case?¹ The reason, above, that I was so surprised that I was the only other progeny of a physician in my class(room) was because more or less my entire cohort was similarly class marked. It may be different at universities other than mine, but at my university, it certainly does not seem that our division is handing out degrees to large populations of people coming from bottom quintile households. I mean, it’s not like we sit around talking about ski trips to Gstaad, but it’s also not true that, by (selfishly) going off to graduate school in Humanities, we’re wasting our intellectual capital that could be better served by getting a good job with which to feed our parents and siblings.

I wish I had the Google skills to figure out the median household income of every entering humanities PhD student. If I had to bet, I would even give odds that the median is above the US median. I’d even give better than 1-1 odds that it’s higher than the median of entering freshmen. What’s more, I wonder if the median household income of parents of students finishing their PhDs is even higher. I’m willing to be wrong on this, but I’m not so sure I am. My own experience (at, of course, a private university) informs my confidence. It’s a confidence massaged by years of preppy snobbery, doncha know.

Thomas H. Benton, referenced in my last post, boils down the community of appropriate humanities PhD seekers to four categories. One, those who are getting the degree as a credential to improve their current position at their current job, I’ll not consider here. The other three are those who are independently wealthy, those who have spouses who can support them, and those who are hilariously well-connected enough to get jobs in academia. In other words, Benton, almost two years before the Browne Report, is arguing in favor of what Hay is afraid of becoming the norm. The future hasn’t been canceled, as McQuillan quotes Graham Allen. It’s just already here. And maybe it has been here for a while.

When the pushy undergrad in the Xtra Normal video asserts that “money isn’t important to me,” she’s probably right. She’s probably in the same position I’m in–not a financial burden to anyone while, at the same time, not (financially) burdened by others (or by their expectations). I suspect that it takes a certain kind of preexisting class position to make that leap, to dare to say something like “money isn’t important to me.” After all, no parent with class mobility on the mind brags about how their brilliant child is going to be an anxious graduate student barely making five digits when he or she grows up.

1. I can see that Hay does not mean graduate study here, but I do. I’m not at all attacking Hays here; I’m just registering how the comment struck me.

I don’t have much to add about the above video, which probably every Humanities graduate student (or close family member thereof) has already seen, forwarded, groaned or giggled over, and so on. Over at Zunguzungu, we see how the situation is coded in a few ways at once, most notably as a conflict between realism and idealism, such that we graduate students, being of course brilliant realists (which is why we got into grad school in the first place) see the eager undergrad as a laughable fool. Not as, you know, us.

I have an issue with this reading, and it’s enhanced by looking back at Thomas H. Benton’s Chronicle piece from almost two years ago. Benton critiques exactly the sort of behavior shown by the professor in the above clip, who, despite all her warnings to the undergrad, agrees to write the recommendation anyway. In reminding us that professors are “generally too eager to clone themselves,” Benton shatters the idea that somehow the undergrad is not “us.” After all, regardless of our own fantasies of self-worth, we were all at one point in that same office, asking the same thing. Who is to say that we did not sound as foolish and that the professor, similarly exasperated, agreed to our demands, even if just to get us out the door?

Other than her eagerness to work with Harold Bloom, nothing about the undergrad struck me as different from myself. Nothing. I’ve even uttered, word for word, sentiments from the video like the mighty white “money is not important to me.”

Had I not already grokked the Benton piece two years ago (and come to terms with it), I would’ve probably found the video to be completely demoralizing.

Instead, though, I was also reminded of an earlier Xtra Normal video that was on heavy rotation this summer while I was living with an eager to tease Applephobe who considers every Mac/iPhone user (like me) a contemptible fanboy:

I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to see these conversations as, pretty much, exactly the same, except for the end result: in one, the obstinate one gets what she wants, and in the other, the obstinate one takes its business elsewhere.

The dark brown animal is absolutely unswayable regarding its desire: to own an iPhone 4. But when pressed for reasons why, they’re all either tautologies or immaterial. Even when presented with an HTC Evo that can grant three wishes, including a wish for an iPhone 4, the animal persists in wanting only an iPhone 4. Similarly, our undergraduate is unswayable regarding her desire to go to grad school, but when pressed, her reasons are either not well thought out or redundant. I find it telling that after wanting to be a professor, the next reason she gives for going involves being given a grade on a paper by a professor, thereby fulfilling Benton’s warnings about idealising the structured academic life built of little gold stars the student can always chase as though he or she were playing Super Mario 64.

So the seeming solution is to make sure you know what you want before you apply to grad school. Or know that your goal is probably risky, so have a backup plan in place.

There is a third option, hinted at in the video but more explicitly mentioned in the Zunguzungu piece:

Grad school is the thing itself; you might get a job at the end of it, but if you want to do it because you want to be a professor, you’re setting yourself up. You have to want to be a grad student, and to be aware of what that entails.

Compare this to the student’s desires to see how far she can push her ideas on the theme of death in Hamlet/Emerson. Though she repeats strongly for her desire to be a college professor (“I want to be a college professor” is this video’s “I want an iPhone 4″), I can’t help but imagine, and this may be reading myself into the student, that she sees that sort of career path as not precisely that. There are some careerist elements to the student’s dream: she wants to teach and be an inspiration, but most of the careerist concerns about committees, long hours, and the rest, come, instead, from the professor. In that sense, the undergrad has a “clean” desire of pursuing an intellectual project. Scraping together a living in the meantime is only a means by which she can realize that goal. Is that so wrong? Or so different from why people should be in grad school?

Incidentally, I have a few more ideas about the self-selection in this video as well as in Benton’s piece, but remember, I said I didn’t have much to add, so I’ll save that for a later post.

Talking about the fact that I don’t eat meat is astonishingly boring to me, and I hate answering questions of the “why did you start?” or “don’t you miss?” sort. I find amusing people who apologize for eating meat in front of me, and I consider arguments about whether or not one should stop eating meat tedious at best (and resent myself for letting myself get drawn into them). There are plenty of books that argue living like I do (more or less), and I’m such not a vegetarian evangelist that I don’t have the arguments committed to memory.

I think that the only interesting thing about my decision is that I haven’t been tempted, at all, to go back on it except for once, while reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael Pollan’s book is, in general, very good, and I liked his exceptionally nuanced approach to not eating meat. He approached it clearly, without any agenda one way or another, and explained in detail why it’s a good way of living. But he also added that, basically, plants need nitrogen, and they get that nitrogen from dead animals. That sort of Cycle of Life thing made me pause to consider the effect of my removing myself from the nitrogen cycle. But I bailed, since by this point, a weak philosophical pro-meat position could not do adequate battle with what has become simple aesthetic revulsion regarding eating meat. The lack of temptation makes the very fact of my not wavering, of my sticking to this whole regime, equally uninteresting.

My mom once told me that she considers this quirk of mine proof of my ability to be stubborn and stick to something I set my mind to. I guess that’s about right, and that’s about all that’s left that bears remarking on this little anniversary, an anniversary I would probably have forgotten if not for the fact that someone asked me just last month how long it had been, and I calculated myself one month shy of my china anniversary. So there it is. I’ll celebrate with some lentils and couscous—the same thing I ate yesterday.

1. On Mikutavičius, not singing “Trys milijonai,” and cultural patrimony discusses the mini-scandal that emerged when Marijonas Mikutavičius elected not to sing his sports anthem, “Trys milijonai,” at the huge public reception for the bronze medal–winning Lithuanian basketball team last week. In his written defense, Mikutavičius provocatively claimed that the song belongs to “the nation,” and I wonder what may come of that.
2. “Dual Genocide” condemned in UK paper; paper subsequently condemned returns to a far too frequent theme on Lithchat: a resistance to Lithuanian political inclination toward treating the Holocaust and the terrors of the Soviet regime as generically similar events that can be classified as a “dual genocide.” A journalist from The Guardian traveled to Lithuania to see how the nation commemorates both the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation and finds that the desire to transcend comparison, inherent in the theory of “dual genocide” does not end up being the case in fact. The columnist is subsequently denounced by popular English-Lithuanian blogger Andrius Užkalnis (in Lithuanian), and I respond to him.
3. Cardinal directions in Lithuanian culture addresses a funny set of experiences I had while in Vilnius regarding disinterest/ignorance when it came to knowing where north is at any given moment. It’s me playing awful anthropologist, but I found the experience interesting. I also answer, in a footnote, a question I’ve had about the MBTA for decades.

H N A PA

Then I immediately got up and was confused about this letter stream. Read out in French, this would be:

/aʃ/ /ɛn/ /a/ (or /ɑ/) /pa/

or:

/aʃ/ en a pas

So it’s a bit clear what’s going on here beyond the English pun of “pa.” But if one were to pronounce the “A” in English, as /eɪ/, we now get:

/aʃ/ en ai pas

This is really close to “j’en ai pas”—a colloquial way of saying “I don’t have one.” But that sentence would look something like:

/ʒɛneɪ/ /pa/

So what to do about that /aʃ/? Well, as it turns out, that sounds a whole lot like /əʃ/, or “aš,” the first person singular pronoun in Lithuanian. Kind of a mess, especially when I think what one would write in the form there would be, simply, “inconnu.” But still a neat way for me to start the morning.

1. The form part is clear, as I have a daunting form on my desk from the French government that I’m putting off filling out. As for the functionally illiterate person who doesn’t know his dad, I’m sure you can guess what show I watched a few episodes of before going to bed last night.

At yesterday’s orientation for the new year-long students from Chicago, the warnings about the strike were repeated. “La grève,” students were told, is a part of French culture, and now that you’re in France, you should get used to it.

The idea of a general strike in the US strikes me as completely outrageous, and not just because only about 12% of the workforce is organized.² After all, only 8% of the French labor force is organized (yes, you read that correctly), but here the unions are “bien implantées.” Instead, the general strike makes no sense because there’s an American fetish for grassroots activism. I want to expand on this idea a bit here, so that, at least for me, I can try to figure out why political action feels so suffocating in the US. Suffocating and useless.

But before I continue, I want to throw this out: the closest thing we’ve had to a general strike in my political lifetime is the threat among huffy, self-interested libertarians to “go Galt.” The continued activity of the allegedly anti-free market US economy more or less proves that either the goGalters haven’t gone Galt of that none of them is, actually, or as a collective, as crucial to the US economy as John Galt is/was.³

The Tea Party and the Galteteers, though, will have to wait a bit, since, first, I want to talk about 2008. Barack Obama’s election, as Jay Smooth points out, was both a “huge, transcendent, symbolic moment” as well as “a good, but mundane, political moment that could turn out well only if we put four years of work into it.” Jay managed to capture my own ambivalence over the election, and, as I wrote about the 3CT confab “The Event of Obama,” one of the main take home messages of the election of Obama was the idea that we may have a President who, if not politically in line with the grassroots, at least might respect the efforts of the grassroots.⁴ Obama’s election seemed, as far as tactics were concerned, to be proof that if enough small-timers get together, massive change can occur. But although there are obvious mistakes with this belief—namely in the way that, once Obama had the nomination, he was able to mobilize the non-trivial organizational power of both labor unions and the DNC—the fantasy remains. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the establishment candidate, but the grassroots stepped in and said that, instead, they wanted Obama. Furthermore, Obama himself had worked as a community organizer, suggesting that he had a certain respect and appreciation of the work grassroots organizers do.

And we’ve seen how that has worked out. At least from the view I get over here of the US, the grassroots that worked so hard for Obama has more or less abandoned him (not that I can blame them) to the degree that we’re hearing about potential bloodbaths at the ballot box come November. But, if we take the charitable view, there is a segment of the American population that has taken Jay’s advice and continued the grassroots pressure on “our employee,” the President. And that’s the Tea Party.

I find this (and, again, I’m trying to be charitable for the moment) fascinating. One grassroots gets Obama elected and then recedes in frustration over his administration, despite understanding that it was only with their continued effort that Obama would pursue policies that the grassroots supports. Instead, a completely new grassroots organization emerges to put pressure on the administration, but it’s a pressure from a completely different political position.⁵ My suspicion is in two parts here: first, that the grassroots supporting Obama was possibly over-romanticized (remember: labor, DNC, Obama’s own operations); and second, that the Tea Party depends, as I suggested in the last post, on being grassroots in order to derive its legitimacy, despite being dubiously grassroots.

So why is the grassroots so important? I don’t know. I won’t perform a history of grassroots activism, but I will note that the OED traces the word to a distinct American heritage, finding the first example in a description of Roosevelt:

1912 McClure’s Mag. July 324/1 From the Roosevelt standpoint, especially, it was a campaign from the ‘grass roots up’. The voter was the thing.

That line about “the voter was the thing” aligns grassroots activism with a very specific sense of anti-collective action. Power (sovereignty) is located in the specific voter and in the specific desires of the specific voter. And without dusting off Tocqueville, I suspect that there’s a whole lot of (American) value placed in approaching politics in this fashion.

Perhaps the importance of grassroots activism in the US is indicated by the pejorative term “astroturfing,” that is, creating a “fake” grassroots movement (you know, like the Tea Party) by funneling centralized cash into various ephemeral organizations that are provided with seemingly sui generis letters to the editor ready for submission to local newspapers and the like. Astroturfing proves that there’s a certain legitimacy attached to grassroots, if organizations are willing to hide their involvement to give cover to a sort of organic movement. Note that I’m not talking about companies or advertising campaigns, which, for obvious reasons, want to hide their corporate/marketing sources, although one could (should) argue that the Tea Party is viral marketing for both Fox News and Koch Industries.

But this all comes at what cost, leading to the question in the post’s title. Obama’s election was partly the result of grassroots work, but it still was obviously not just that. The transcendent aspect of the election had to do with raw numbers of voters turning out and so on, whether they were so inspired by their own dissatisfaction with the previous administration, or encouraged by their union, their family, on DNC canvassers hitting the streets. Eventually the tree took over, precinct captains were assigned, and so on. And in the aftermath, as I said, it was the “Yes we did!” sensibility that conquered the narrative, this idea of an amorphous “we” that spontaneously rallied around a certain candidate and, totally organically, voted for change.

I’m not sure anyone believes the strong version of this narrative, or if anyone did, they have certainly abandoned it by now. But this strong version is crucial to the continued Tea Party success.⁶ Read any mainstream article about the Tea Party, and it’ll have narratives similar to the kinds of narratives we heard in 2008. “I’ve never been political before,” one person might say. Another might say, “I finally decided I had had enough.” A third, “So I decided to have a little get together at my overleveraged house.” And then on their list of demands is merely “wanting American back,” with some muddled talking points affixed that reference communism or something… not much different from “I want change I can believe in.”

Ultimately, though, these reasons are selfish. Egotistical. Individualism is always the realm of the narcissist, and that may be most obvious when it comes to political expression, which is the main issue I have with not only the popularity of grassroots activism, but also with the (Tea Party’s) need to maintain the fiction of the grassroots. The individual stirs to action only when the individual has personally had enough, the story goes, when the America that individual imagined is now no longer available.

Compare this with the rally in France on Saturday or the general strike today. Sure, the Roma marched for their own rights, but they were joined by tens of thousands of non-Roma who don’t like what the Republic is doing–not to themselves, but to others (Roma). And today’s general strike, though called by seven unions, is being supported by other organizations–organizations that are potentially totally uninvolved with the specific issues on the table. The constituent, centralized organizations are able to call upon their members to sublimate their individual concerns for the greater good of what the organization (the community, even) wants to do, a good determined at least indirectly democratically.

The Tea Party demands no sublimation.⁷ Can you imagine these people rallying in support of the mistreatment of others? (Undocumented workers, victims of institutional racism, etc.) It’s absolutely incomprehensible, since the crux of the organization is self-interest.⁸ Look at the rhetoric: “America back.” “Restoring.”⁹ There’s nothing altruistic or communitarian here. It’s petulance in tricorners and court shoes.¹⁰ And it’s not even forward-thinking petulance. It’s womb-seeking regression.¹¹

When a movement has clarified structure, has an organization helping design and refine the collective desires of the membership, the movement makes sense. Saturday’s rally was to protest the government’s recent actions regarding Roma and other Travellers. But the specific issue also resonated with larger issues: the racism and xenophobia of the state and its Sarkozyite slope toward police power. It all fits within a family of political concerns. But the American fixation on the grassroots, now most visible with the Tea Party, disallows that kind of clarity. One price of organic structure is that you get blobs, fuzzy entities that are largely illegible. So while I understand why the Tea Party has to keep up that fiction (who would turn out and march “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Lets give Rupert much more dough!”?), I don’t understand why the American fantasy relies on it so much.

I mean, didn’t this financial crisis teach us why overvaluing individualism might be, you know, a bad thing?

1. In fact, it felt like there were more bikes around than normal.
2. I don’t recall from where I got Sunday’s “7%.” I thought it was from this David Harvey paper, but that does not seem to be right.
3. What the fuck do I know. It’s not like I’ve actually read this book.
4. Later, I draw a strong connection between grassroots with self-interest. I maintain that there’s always an element of that that is then sublimated, as the self gives its interest over to the collective organization that often emerges out of grassroots activism. I doubt many non-profit organizations were founded by fiat from above; concerned people got together and realized the value of collective action. It’s that second step, so feared by the “definitionally” decentralized Tea Party that condemns it to being a collection of confused, selfish gnats.
5. Someone needs to do an anthropological study on the “Change We Can Believe In”ers-cum-Tea Partiers.
6. I’m aware that larger Tea Party organizations have emerged, but my sense of them–in other words, how they exist in the media narrative–is of them as sort of tenuous alliances. This of course helps the larger Idea of the Tea Party to avoid damage when someone acts the racist, but it also helps continue the fiction of the founding of the Tea Party(s).
7. I’m not sure “sublimation” is the right word here, but I think the point is clear.
8. There’s a Niemöllerin aspect to the French model that can’t be discounted, of course, where self-interest supports some sense of community involvement, because one hopes that the community will have your back when the state turns against your particular group. But we have majority actors (middle-class, white French) involved in the community–hypothetically the safest demographic in the Republic. At the same time, I’m not sure how far you can go calling “a rising tide raises all ships” self-interested.
9. Yes, this rhetoric existed–and I probably used it–during the Bush administration and Obama campaigns. But it took the absurdity of these whiny wannabe tax cheats for me to see the problem with this approach.
10. Making the Tea Party the aesthetic and philosophical equivalent of, um, Marie Antoinette?
11. Wombs left crowded by unwanted pregnancies, but, still…

“Sarkozy: ça pue Vichy” (click to enlarge)

When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very people who abandoned him during the regional elections earlier this year. Most notably, Sarkozy has called for the deportation of Roma and other Travellers from France, even though, as EU citizens, the Roma have every right to be in France. Stoking xenophobic fears is a classic pétainiste move, as we saw in last year’s L’Armée du crime, which showed how the Résistance was demonized in Vichy France as being overrun with foreigners and communists (which it, of course, was, to its credit). I suppose the Sarkozy government was more willing to stir up a human rights fight than continue hearing the endless stream of bad news regarding the Woerth/Bettencourt affair, but the mistreatment of the Roma and the “Gens du voyage” prompted a massive protest on Saturday that led tens of thousands of protesters from the Place de la République to the Bastille and back to the infamous Hôtel de Ville, and it’s the ideas that the manif prompted that I want to address below.

I attended a few anti-Soviet (well, pro-Lithuanian independence) rallies in the late 1980s, including riding in a bus with a bunch of activists from Boston to Washington DC to protest the visit of Eduard Shevardnadze at the USSR embassy.¹ Part of the appeal of the protest was the night before, when the activists would all congregate somewhere and prepare their signs. We were an unfunded outfit, so our own manual labor had to produce the signs we would wave.²

On one trip to DC, however, I was there coinciding with a Teamsters rally against NAFTA, I think.³ The Mall was littered with discarded signs, almost all printed at some cost to someone! in two colors on white. I brought one back with me (to put up on my wall in my dorm, thereby enhancing my lefty cred at prep school), but seeing the mass produced signs really bothered me. There was something fake, I felt, about participating in a rally featuring such mechanical reproduction. I went to rallies, I felt, because I cared about the issues, and I cared about the issues enough to spend the time to invent a funny slogan / sign, draw it in (again, illegibly mannered) typography, and carry it with pride. A printed sign, even a union-printed sign, seemed like the refuge of a poseur, a readymade protest for the kind of person who just showed up at a rally without any serious commitment to the issues involved.

We are all Roma. (click to enlarge)

Fairly or not, this perspective reached for me its most absurd levels in 2000, when Hadassah Lieberman would appear somewhere and the crowd would wave all these identical blue signs reading “Hadassah!” I mean, no disrespect to the potential future Second Lady, but the signs showed a kind of enthusiasm over her that felt completely fake to me.⁴ Then, during Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver in 2008, if I recall correctly, the entire crowd on cue began waving “Help Is On the Way” signs as he began to use it as a theme in his speech. This is one example of many, but this sort of reproduction of the audience as a photoshopped mass waving the same signs over and over has become a kind of staple of US political expression at the national party level (I don’t know about other levels).

At the rally to support the rights of Roma and Travellers on Saturday, however, the mechanical reproduction of protest imagery was part of the point. First, the Fédération anarchiste scored a major coup with their black inverted triangle stickers that had the word “ROM” printed on them in a font that looked like Hebrew.⁵ In a Spartacus move, the stickers asserted the power of collective action over individual particularity. If the government plans on separating the Roma from the rest of the French population, then the rest of the French population will assert themselves as Roma, ruining the efforts of isolating a community. Considering the principle of égalité, if we can’t all be equal in being ethnically neutral, then we’ll all be equal by being marked as Roma. As one (hand-made) sign pithily put it, “NOUS SOMMES TOUS LES R HOMMES.”

Simply put, the stickers offered both an easy means of integrating oneself into the rally, but also a means of showing the quantitative support of the rights of the Roma. Showing up at République is already a certain political gesture after all, and the sticker is a marker that makes you stay. I mean, I doubt people were just walking around the Third yesterday, saw a bunch of activists, and decided to get involved.

“Non à la république du fric, des flics et des patrons !” (click to enlarge)

Furthermore, as is I imagine the norm for French manifestations, the quantitative strength (total numbers) is only part of the story. There’s probably some element of pee contesting between the various heavy hitters as far as making the biggest show. The Confédération Générale du Travail, for example, had (at least) two trucks, two balloons, lots of music, and tons and tons of stickers to give out. The newbie Nouveau parti anticapitaliste also had lots of stickers, a truck blasting anti-Sarkozy hip-hop, and widely reproduced posters calling for an end to the “République du fric, des flics et des patrons.” The larger parties, including the consolidated Front de gauche, made up of the PCF and other center-left parties, and the Parti socialiste made up the rearguard of the march, and they had what seemed to be the clearest image of reproduced signage. And they also seemed the least enthusiastic of any of the organizations marching. The representatives of the PS looked downright bored.

That boredom suggested a kind of tension in the rally, a tension between individual interest and collective interest. That is, I suspect a lot of people turned out largely because the group called on them to do so. I’m certain that everyone present honestly believes that Sarkozy is being a complete asshole with his actions toward the Roma, but that if the PS/PCF/whoever had not called on its members to come out to protest the position, they might not have. I saw this all over the place–the rally felt more like a big social occasion, a chance to catch up with friends after a long summer apart on vacation (C’est la rentrée, after all!). Sure, there was chanting, the CGT blasted the “Internationale” on its stereo system, and many sang along, but I do not suspect that anyone shouted themselves hoarse like I did at the May Day rally in Chicago in 2006. What I mean to suggest here is that the very act of rallying as a group means something more than just “caring about the issues.” The social, community element is extremely important too, which is why it’s no surprise that the friend I went with is an anthropologist who is studying precisely one of the groups that showed up. The rally is a chance to meet up with your fellow commies, say, and chit chat, and feel like part of a group that has both social and political value to you.

In this case, where the rally is made up of specific groups/parties made up of people who know each other, the mechanical reproducibility provides not just pissing contest “look at the show we put on” bragging rights, but also extends a kind of belonging. The “ROM” sticker was an outward political gesture of ironic protest to a republic that is not terribly interested in making certain people feel like they belong. The “la CGT” or “NPA” stickers, on the other hand, were precisely the opposite–they were ways of expressing specific membership in a group as a way of belonging to that group.⁶ If everyone showed up with their own hand-made signs, no one could be critiqued for not putting in the advance effort, but the rally would not be able to take advantage of feelings of belonging that predate the rally, that predate the issue, even.

This point is important when I try to bring what I pieced together about this rally with what I know about anti-war rallies in the US in the early part of this century and with what I read about Tea Party rallies, including the “Restore honorable gold trading” rally this past weekend in DC.

[This part of the post is not terribly well researched. Sorry.]

A complaint I often heard about those anti-war rallies hinged on the fact that they were organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. Critics of the rallies pointed out that A.N.S.W.E.R. was a radical fringe group and that there is no way on earth those tens upon tens of thousands of people would actually agree to most of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s actual political positions. As a result, the rallies were somehow… illegitimate. In response, I recall hearing people say that they did not care who it was who did the logistics.⁷ They, themselves, as individuals, felt the need to express their dissatisfaction with the Bush administration. I imagine they, too, felt like they needed to be around other people who felt like they did, regardless of other political or social connections, just to feel like they weren’t alone with their anti-war sentiments.⁸ But it kind of defuses the community, turning an anti-war march into some kind of shameful gathering of transgressors. Everyone arrives via a different route, stays a while to indulge in their transgressions, and then floats back off in separate directions. It’s the nonce community of something like a tearoom, maybe?

But this individualist/organic spirit that was used to discredit the anti-war movement is now, perversely, the seeming source of the Tea Party’s power. The Tea Party is To Be Reckoned With precisely because it is, despite what the lamestream media might say about either Sarah Palin or the Koch brothers, decentralized, individual, emergent like a rhizome, full of nodes firing along unpredictable channels. If the Tea Party were seen to be yet another in a long line of arboreal forms of protest, then it would be dismissable as just politics as usual. But no, its faux organicism is exactly what makes it stylish. They are the pre-destroyed jeans of our political wardrobe.⁹

What I mean here is that as long as the Tea Party can convince the media and the politicians and the public that they represent a sort of disorganized, uncertain, but palatable discontent within the US, those groups can ignore the Tea Party only at their risk. The American fetish of grassroots activism, which is why Obama was considered to be so transcendent, helps the public to dismiss forms of protest that are markedly coming “from above,” say, from a union, “demanding” that its members turn out to protest something or help someone get elected.¹⁰

So it’s funny to me to see the lengths to which the Palin machine goes to hide its continuity, acting instead as a reactive bouncy ball that rolls over to whichever “organization” wants to shell out the six figures to hear Sarah Palin speak. There should be no shame in declaring organizational affiliation even on the national level. It might just help those Tea Partiers feel like they belong to something, instead of just whining about how they want “America back.”

1. This was the high point of my ’60s glorification. I was interviewed by a newspaper and said I had wished I lived in that time period, so that I could be part of a protest movement. In retrospect, I find that sentiment absurd in the extreme, but the person having it was, like, 13, so chillax.
2. Mine were invariably too wordy and my typography was outrageously mannered, making my posters gibberish as far as political call to action is concerned. Others were content with just scrawling “Nyet, Nyet, Soviet!” on their signs. I had to be fancy.
3. This is probably the late-August trip I took to DC to see Georgetown in 1993, then.
4. This is most certainly a feeling related to my general sense of disappointment with Gore’s choice of a running mate.
5. The Roma actually wore brown triangles in German concentration camps.
6. After the “ROM” sticker, which I did not get, an “NPA” sticker was my second most coveted, since I’ve felt a bit of kinship with them based on my following their work over the past year. It also looks awesome.
7. I recall this being an often repeated response to the Nation of Islam and the Million Man March. The issues that the march brought up were more important than the positives or negatives of the organization setting up the march.
8. I wrote an article for the Maroon around that time about how I felt like I had become incomprehensible when it came to discussing the war. The anti-war position was so silent in the mass media, yet seemed so obviously the right course of action, that I felt like the only reason we were going to war was because the anti-war people were, simply, incoherent. We were incapable of making sense. Man, what an awful time that was. Is.
9. In Vilnius this summer I saw two young women walking together in identical destroyed jeans. It was jarring, to say the least.
10. This coercive power of unions, of course, is why they are the devil and why even 7% of a workforce’s being organized is 7% too much.

Citroën DS at Café de Paris. (click to enlarge)

This might get a bit weepy or whiny in places, but I promise there’s a bigger point to it.

I’m writing this post from Café de Paris, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like, except that it’s in Vilnius. I’ve spent a lot of time here over the two months I’ve been in Lithuania, and it’s not entirely because I pursue a Parisian lifestyle here. What I do here (drink espressos and play on my computer) would bankrupt me in a Parisian setting, where the coffee is about three times more expensive.

But being here has been part of a set of actions that has made me start to miss Paris rather terribly, which I find bizarre in the extreme. Remember, I’m the person who left for Paris with absolutely no sort of romantic illusions or fantasies about the city–it hadn’t even been a city I particularly wanted to visit, much less live in. A couple other things have helped push this missing along. First, I was reading, at the same time, two books: David Harvey’s Paris: Capital of Modernity, which I found not as great as I hoped it would be, though the last chapter, on the Commune, is a must-read; and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which I had found in a Russian edition for students of English (so there were Russian glosses of idioms and historical personages and places; love it).¹ Further, watching L’Armée du crime last night (prompted by this review) also upped a bit of the emotional longing. This emotional longing is weird, because while I absolutely adore living in Paris, I certainly don’t think I’ve developed, a posteriori, the sorts of fantasies about the city that many arrive with.

So there must be something else I miss, and I think what that thing could be is named, variously, “structure” or “work.” When I first explained to friends that I would be spending two months in Vilnius this summer, most were convinced that I would drown in a giant ocean of debt, settling into my usual Vilnius routine of two meals at restaurants every day and six hour shifts at nightclubs every night. No, I kept reassuring them. This would not be a vacation. I had a writing deadline to meet and money to not spend. I would finally experience Vilnius not as a partying tourist, but as something even resembling a local; I even bought more than one bus ticket at a time, knowing there would be multiple future trips on Vilnius public transportation!

The first month felt like that of a local: I stayed in the apartment as much as I could and read, took notes, and even wrote. A couple friends blew through, but usually I would only go out to watch a World Cup match and then go to a club afterward for a drink or two. But the deadline came and went, and my writing—which sketches out a theory of the realist novel that is scale-less, historico-geographically materialist yet non-transcendental, non-humanist, pre-cognitively affect-based, and counter-factual—was submitted.

Suddenly, I was again a bit adrift what concerns the dissertation. I felt entitled to a mini-vacation because of the amount of focus I had expended the previous seven or so weeks putting together the theory (much was based on stuff I had just read in the past few weeks!). But by that point, I only had about three weeks left in my trip, and all my earlier desires to establish some level of permanence out here (I even considered starting up a early 20th c. short story reading group!) started being framed in the sense of “you’re leaving in three weeks. Don’t tie yourself down.”

And so I’ve been drifting. I’ve worked a bit on the chapter revision I need to do, but mostly, I’ve sat in the apartment and watched downloaded television and movies. I don’t really leave the apartment except to buy food, and it all seems like a bit of a waste of my time out here.² I can’t wait to get back to Paris, I keep telling myself, even though my day-to-day life in France is not terribly different from what I’ve settled into here; I tend to spend most of my time there in my apartment reading and sometimes leave only to get food from Carrefour.

But in Paris, I have a job. I’m required, four times a week, to travel the 20 minutes by bike to the Paris Center and spend a handful of hours there helping students and faculty with their computer troubles.³ So I feel rather plugged into some kind of community, even if it’s made up of co-workers and student-clients. Here, I don’t really have many friends, and the friends I have are pretty much always busy and not willing or able to alter their schedule to fit my idiosyncracies. So I drift into a solitary bubble. Further, because I’m a transient (leaving in less than a week!), I’m very disinclined to go out and meet new people or try to enrich already existing acquaintances (into friendships).

It’s funny what work does, right? I watched Toy Story 3 this morning, and I finally understood Aaron’s point about its relationship to labor. I feel a bit like the toys. Without a structured job, I feel useless, adrift. This is why I don’t like vacations in general, and I certainly don’t like vacations that last more than a week. After a while they become grossly indulgent.⁴ Of course, it helps that my job is not a grind and that I enjoy it and that it provides me with piles of flexibility and freedom. I appreciate all that, and I don’t look badly at people who need to simply escape from their wage slavery for a while and rebuild themselves.

But it’s not for me. These past few weeks have been a sort of murky hell of indecision, sloth, and basically an endless open mic night for my worst self-indulgences.

So where this gets complicated is when I think beyond my post in Paris, when I will, hopefully, have a diss-writing fellowship so that I can get the hell out of grad school with a finished dissertation. If I’ve only had my dissertation to work on for the past three weeks and felt like a floating cloud of scum that has gotten little to nothing done, what will I do if I’m lucky enough to win a fellowship, so that I will be paid only to write and will be prevented from having a “job” by the terms of the award? I’m terrified that this Vilnius muck will return.

Of course, I could take Brian Croxall’s advice and treat grad school like a job, finding some little never-before-used reservoir of discipline in my body and do something like go to the library for 9–5 every day. Furthermore, I suspect that my fellowship year will be chock full of various writing deadlines. Finally, I won’t be a couch-surfing transient for that year. I’ll have my computer, my workspace, and the rest.

So I’ve got that going for me.

1. It’s been kind of the Summer of Harvey here, as I spent much of June fighting through a close-read of the ontology he develops in Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, and then I followed up in July reading newer essays by him and about him and about how he’s old-fashioned and Marxism is over, and so on.
2. Granted, some of the disinclination to do stuff has been related to by slicing the hell out of my toes from stepping on broken glass, an injury that has taken over two weeks to heal and has left my eagerness to walk a lot (a Vilnius must) wanting.
3. There are other things I have in Paris that I don’t have in Vilnius, including a sense of permanence about my living quarters. Here I have been moving every few weeks between two apartments depending on the visiting schedules of others. Furthermore, in Paris I have my normal computer, which provides a much more pleasant reading / writing / creating environment than my little netbook.
4. Part of this, though I don’t know how much, is related to the fact that I do not like the fact that I am only spending money now and not earning any. Weirdly (or maybe not), I get very, very anxious when I’m not earning money.

I think it’s funny that JFK could have merged the idea of the “Global South” with the literal southern hemisphere. Randall Munroe’s snarky joke doesn’t change the metaphorical power of the expression.

But what a glance at Munroe’s own map shows is that the bulk of the land on Earth is located north of the Equator, so if we picked a speck of terrain at random, it’ll more often fall north of the Equator. What if, I then wondered, I got rid of the Equator and split the Earth in half by area, in effect making an “Area Equator,” so that a randomly selected point on land would have a 50% chance of landing in the “South” as opposed to the “North.” What might that world look like?

Enter Quantum GIS. I downloaded a shapefile of the world, and it had area already keyed in as an attribute for each country.¹ I was ready to calculate the areas of each polygon, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. Then I added polygons until the sum of the areas of the selected polygons was about half of the total sum of the area. Next, I chose an outrageous color scheme. The results:²

The world, split by area. (click to enlarge)

What’s interesting is that this map is not so terribly different than the map of the North-South Divide provided by Wikipedia. The main difference is that I include Australia, while they include much more of Asia. China by itself has a larger area than Australia, so subtracting the Aussies from my area list and adding China would already knock the swing out. But my point is, at this stage, strictly cartographical.³ One can now sort of see where the “Area Equator” of the Earth is.

So this doesn’t let JFK off the hook, but it might nuance the point a bit.

1. There were some errors. A handful of small countries and Eritrea reported 0 for their area.
2. I ran the test twice, with and without Antarctica. Mostly adding in that frozen landmass means that I have to deselect much of the Middle East, Pakistan, and, I think, Algeria. So it’s not terribly different. Remember: Antarctica is never as big as it seems on unprojected maps.
3. Another caveat: I have no idea where the “area” calculation came from, so who knows how reliable my results are.