From Streetcars To Spaceships

A brief note on Stumptown

Like a lot of us who were in Portland this past weekend, I spent most of my time at the Stumptown Comics Fest and at events connected to it. There are many things that I would like to say and at some point perhaps I will but for now here are just a few quick points:

• It's past time that we created an award, here in Portland and perhaps nationwide, for the best comic of the year to cover historical themes. I saw at least a dozen comics working with themes in Europe around the time of World War II alone.

• The amount of polished, sophisticated work being done now entirely outside the Big Two is stunning and wonderful.

• I am not happy about the decision to "professionalize" Stumptown. In particular I'm pretty miffed at the policy that vendors can't share a table. What, it's good enough for the Frankfort Book Fair and ComicCon but not Portland? Please.

• We have got to take another look at the stranglehold Diamond has on distribution. We all know this. What are we going to do about it? I would guess that I'm losing out on conservatively two hundred otherwise viable outlets for what I publish because of their monopolistic practices. This is legal how again?

• And lastly, I had a blast at the party at the Jupiter. Wow. Had a fantastic time, on and off and got scads of networking done. But I still think that there's a role for the yearly Cosmic Monkey party. I talked to Andy about it and suggested that he set up a van to ferry folks back to somewhere like the Rose Quarter Transit Center so we could all stay later. That party has been a highly functional and heartwarmingly centering part of Portland independent publishing for years now and I really hope that we don't lose it.

My picks for the show? There were so many great ones but I'll go with The Introvert's Manifesto and Unemployment Man.

Oh, right. And read this. It's Scott Kurtz of PvP giving his take. I missed the NCS panel (which is kinda pathetic since I'd already given both him and Shannon Wheller sh*t about it) but I was at his panel on humor and it was a blast. The room was packed and we all had a blast.

Re Greg Mortenson, how deep does the rot go?

I see that people are finally reading my post from six months ago about Greg Mortenson and the CAI (Central Asia Institute). The 60 minutes piece and the CNN article and all the rest have changed things, haven't they? I never went into details last year about what might be in it for the people who I have long suspected are behind him. So I guess that's kind of overdue.

First of all, I'm going to say it yet again. If you want to get a handle on what's going on in that part of the world, personally, I say drop "Mortenson's" books. Instead, read Charlie Wilson's War (The movie's not bad in its own way), Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, and The Root of Wild Madder: Chasing the History, Mystery, and Lore of the Persian Carpet, by Brian Murphy.

Just for starters, this would also be the time to say that I was born in Panama. To parents who had spent quite a bit of time in Mexico. And each of whom has since spent ample time in the developing world, from Sri Lanka to Kenya to Nicaragua. And very little of that in hotels or other "Americanized"and protected zones. My best friends when I was a little kid were the missionary family down the hall. Their mom was from a Wyoming family of evangelists (she eventually spent years in China) and their dad grew up in a mission in Burma and did his thesis on U Thant, who was then just a local notable. I'll get back to him later.

I could go on with the long list of missionaries and NGO folks and ethnobotanists and mountain climbers in my life or the time I've spent in my own kinds of places that aren't exactly "U.S. mainstream" but let's just say that when I wrote six months ago about having a visceral sense of Mortenson's books being wrong, it wasn't in comparison to Discovery Channel specials. It was in comparison to things like, oh, god, my father is caught in a "civil revolt" again and I'm really impatient to hear from him. Or once, oh crud, here I am arguing with my mother about is it worth keeping our appointments while the smoke from the protests and Guardia Civil's tanks wafts into our room?

Okay, that having been said, it's time for me to speculate.

My guess is that there were people in, well, let's just say the Mary Bono/Mellon-Scaife world, who were uncomfortable with the various movements by people like BRAC to route around the horrific but very controllable "education" infrastructure in south Asia.

In other words, there were, by the late nineties, any number of groups, most native to south Asia, that were working to build schools, many also for especially for girls, tying this into microcredit (note how CAI has now positioned themselves as a gatekeeper for microcredit as well) and enable things like access to birth control and health care for women. In other words, groups that were and still are generally taking a decentralized, locally controlled, collaborative approach to the systemic problems that have kept women (and actually, to some extent, everybody not from the ruling families) relatively powerless in that part of the world for, at the least, centuries.

Now, I don't know about how much y'all followed the Reagan period approach to policy there but a key part of it was a systemic approach to do just the opposite. To keep things such that oil companies and our local totalitarians could "smoothly" keep doing their thing. I've long since lost track of the number of schools U.S.-backed people like the Contras burned down or how many teachers they tortured and killed. And it's not like U.S. foreign policy has exactly become simon-pure since then or avoided such techniques before.

Not to mention that birth control, especially in the developing world, is a big no-no to such people. They feel that it's VERY important to keep groups backing that on the margins. Our Congress has given us demonstrations of just how hard and viciously the right will fight for that quite recently, haven't they?

So they found an American, a charismatic guy raised in a missionary outpost, a very controllable, very ambitious, very Christian guy who was already doing something in the field and happily admitted that he wanted to hand off things like publicity and managing money, and they turned him into a front man they could position publicly as THE voice of education reform in that part of the world. It's a game as old as Alfred Sloane. If you can't kill a threatening movement you build your own organization under your control (G.M. backing Greyhound Lines, anybody?) and position it as the "more legitimate" and emotionally compelling substitute for the people who are threatening your power.

And Greg Mortenson would have been, I suspect, a very controllable front indeed for the person who knew what buttons to push. I don't think that my friends' dad ever quite got the hang of American culture and his permanent confusion about what "America" meant is pretty common among people who grow up overseas in missions. I strongly suspect this applies to Greg Mortenson. They grow up on idealized and very fraught stories of the U.S. and visits from friends of their parents and workers for the mission and some of these former mission kids seem to have trouble all their lives with a certain kind of "in-betweenness" and need to get back to what feels "real" conflicting with a guilt that they should want to be "back" in the U.S. where they've been told they "belong" but never entirely feel comfortable. Except when spending time with others from the same backgrounds which just leaves them driven to go back "overseas" again. Sound familiar?

So if Mortenson's would-be backers/handlers can drape their "suggestions" and "advice" in the language he was brought up in, then he'd be eager to agree and go along. And as, over time, that advice grew to include money and organizational help and maybe now and again "one of our people who'll drop by and fix that little problem you're having with your accounting" he would be quite possibly relieved to be able to turn his back and not look too closely at the details. And as the "help" shifted over to them buying him expensive suits and flying him around on private jets, there would always be somebody there to tell him that this wasn't a bribe or a luxury. Just a selfless part of doing the job. And as the Pakistani and then U.S. military stepped in, he could just keep saying that it was all for the purest of reasons. And as for his millions in "personal expenses", he wasn't stealing CAI's money. It was all for the greater good, really, and surely not at all, well, sinful. I don't think that any of us will ever know how deep the lies went in his head and among the staffers at CAI. But we know that one way or another the answer was "pretty deep."

At the moment the world out there is enjoying their high dudgeon about "this is an OUTRAGE!" but they aren't, from what I've seen, asking the question, "so, if this has been going on for over ten years, why weren't you covering this in, say, 2007, when he was already a celebrity but hadn't gotten the massive support from everybody from the New York Times to Oprah Winfrey that he has now had?"

This is about centralization of power, and the coordination and propaganda machines that play such a key role in making that centralization possible. It's also about the media's collective habits of what to cover and how.

 

And that makes it everybody's business.

 

-Rustin

 

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Good education can be found in more places all the time.

With all the negative things I have to say about mass media in general, you might think that I want all of us to hide in forest caves with no more than a quill pen and a few sheets of paper. T'ain't so. Occasionally I'll get wind of something coming out of the market-directed media that I find not only admirable, but useful. More specifically, I am convinced that we get closer every day to being able to build small, world class educational institutions simply from a building body of works. Works that can serve as superb tools for learning that depend neither on equally superb teachers to be effective nor on conventional textbooks or course-length curricula.

Seems to me that the new documentary about Allan Ginsberg's Howl is an excellent example. As this NY Times article lays out, this movie is itself (according to the author), not only literary criticism, but a solid introduction to what literary criticism is. Even, to some extent, to what it means to be a writer and to write well. Seems to me that a well-built five page teacher's guide to using this film should enable any basically competent teacher to get most kids over the age of twelve up to speed on these dynamics in six or seven hours of class time, including time to see the movie twice. In, let us remember, a way tied to enough emotionally rich stimulation to be considerably easier to retain than most pedagogy manages.

Add to this such resources as the much-discussed M.I.T. online materials initiative and sites such as Khan Academy, and we're well on our way to considerably attenuating our dependence on conventional schooling or the arduous, not entirely accepted approaches to home and community schooling available now.

Every day we get a little closer. We just need to learn to use these new resources and spread the word of what we find.

Publishers still have a role to play.

I am an author. I am also a publisher. Both are hardwon skills and both require time and resources. In fact, there's actually not much overlap between the skills and resources involved in each. There should be nothing surprising about the fact that I have had others publish some of what I've written and have sometimes published the work of others.

If this does not seem clear to you, then perhaps a few minutes of reading will improve your perspective. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/03/why-in-fact-publishing-will-not-go-away-anytime-soon-a-deeply-slanted-play-in-three-acts/

Giving props to another jewboy from a bad part of the New York streets

Dig this. I grew up between Central Park and Riverside Park. We saw the sunrise from our balcony and could walk to Columbia University. So very pretty. But right on our block it wasn't all so pretty. The shooting galleries across the street gave us a regular supply of junkies, sometimes unconcious or dead in the gutter. The addicts and street kids playing until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. in the basketball courts right below us would have been loud enough if they had just played but instead we got a regular diet of arguments, knife fights, and broken glass and blood on the streets in the morning.

So when I tell you that I grew up in New York City I want you to understand that I don't mean Park Avenue and I don't mean the cleaned up, prettified world you see now. The seventies were rough around my part of town and it only took a couple years in P.S. 84 to guarantee that I would never sound or move or think like the products of the suburbs who now make up most of this country.

But I want you to understand something else. The sounds of our blocks had plenty of crazies and beatdowns on hot summer nights but we also had the funk. We had boogie and merengue and salsa and my stepfather's old jazz albums from back when he had a band hitting the small towns of the south in the days of Dizzy and the Duke.

If you kept your shit together and you never got sloppy or stupid or looked like you had something valuable to steal, my little piece of the city could be a beautiful place in it's grubby, hustling, drugged-out way.

I don't know if I would ever want to go back there but I miss it sometimes. Eating french fries out a paper bag and watching the people go by. A big steaming plate of arroz con pollo served by a Chinese-looking guy with a full Cuban pompadour and a guayabera peeking out from his stained white jacket. A bunch of guys in a rough circle around a splintery bench, jamming with bongos and guitar cut by somebody's sweet, longing voice. Sneaking into the abandoned rail yard with a friend, keeping out of the burned out twisted metal former loading docks where the gay guys were hanging and cruising and fucking. Having my own little corner of the then unstaffed northern Central Park, with my little "streambed" I had cut out of the swamp over the course of a few years where an overflowing water pipe provided my stream.

And when I miss that world, nobody brings it back like Howard fucking Chaykin. The man was there. He knows it and he brings it back and soups it up and makes of it a fantasy of sex and menace and hot, languid nights filled with operators and rubes and people just keeping their head down and trying to get by. Rude, lewd, and always trying to get into your mind and your pants.

That's my city, baby. Come on in, take a seat, and order a drink. Keep your eyes open and your eye on your wallet and you may just have a hell of a time.

EVERY kid should have a dictionary.

I think that by now anybody with a clue agrees that we need to get a lot more serious about k-12 education. And here in Oregon it's pretty damn obvious that we're even worse off than most due to the pathetic level of education funding. The schools haven't got enough money to allow the typical "solutions" and they won't any time soon.

Well, that means that we, as citizens, need to find and implement cheaper ways. Ways that don't require any significant involvement or commitments by schools or teachers. Ways that help kids across class, economic, and talent spectra.

So let's start with basics. Sometimes a good place to start is with something that is both useful and that shows the way to doing things that are more difficult or contentious. Something non-controversial so it will be allowed through the schoolhouse gates and will have minimal opposition from parents and other potential roadblocks.

So let's get started on getting a usable, well-designed, kid-optimized dictionary into the hands of every schoolchild in the state of Oregon.

Speaking as a publisher, I know how much it costs to produce, print, and ship books and I'm telling you that for an order of several thousand or more, we could get dictionaries for under a buck apiece. And I'm betting that done right it should be possible to get printers, paper suppliers, and others to kick in enough to get that down to fifty cents a copy.

But let's start with a budget of a dollar-fifty per copy.

And let's start by choosing one year.

I say choose eight grade. It's right around then that kids start to feel most abandoned and it's about then that they are expected to do a lot more for themselves. They're mature enough to handle "adult formatted" type and have vocabularies large enough to justify something a bit more complex than most of them will have access to.

And beyond that, they're reaching the age that it gets essential that they have beautiful things of their own that are sophisticated enough to help develop the sense of nuance that is so essential to good adult judgement. I love ebooks. I'm very in favor of online content. But for certain things, it's still better to have an actual physical copy. And this is one of those things.

Now, my plate is beyond full, so I don't know when or how I'm going to pull this off. It helps that I'll be dealing with plenty of the relevant people anyway in the course of doing my own work. But piece by piece I intend to proof out text, including some Oregon-specific stuff, put together layouts, and do a small print run, possibly, if I have to, on my own nickel. Then I'm going to give them away to the students of any school I can find that will say "yes".

Except for a couple hundred copies that I will keep around as examples. To show to possible donors. Because I want to see a non-profit up and running, one utterly independent of the government, with a charter and an endowment, whose purpose is to work towards having every student in every school in Oregon, from third grade on, walk into school the first week of the year and get asked if they have a dictionary. And if they say "no", one gets handed to them. No other rules, no other conditions. And twenty percent held in reserve each year to be handed out to the kids who lose theirs during the year.

Of course, I have no objection to copies of this being made available for sale in stores. At, say, six bucks a copy. With half of the profits going straight to the endowment. I'm a big believer in the power of a well-configured endowment and nothing in the recent economic news changes that conviction a bit.

You think that I'm nuts? Work it out. I don't have the time to do the links right now, but go for it, look at how many kids are in school in Oregon in a given year. This is a doable thing. And if it is done right, it lays the groundwork for more ambitious plans. For taking a bit more of the load off of schools and parents. For taking advantage of the wonders of modern manufacturing, design, and pedagogical understanding in ways that schools and governments can't and/or won't.

I don't know about you, but I'm eager to get started.

The Portland Zine Symposium and related news

Just in case any of you in the Portland area don't know yet, the Portland Zine Symposium is coming up in two weeks at PSU. If it's anything like last year, it'll be a blast. Hundreds of small publishers, distributors, and makers of cool print-related things of all sorts, from fanzines to hand-painted poetry books to vast posters of sea monsters. Not to mention lectures, teach-ins, at least a couple of bands, and other related shenanigans. I'll have a full table, hopefully, so I expect to have even more fun than I did last year, when, due to a paperwork snafu, I had to share a table and was kinda scrunched. My mother may even come up from Eugene to help staff the table.

Today was the Anarchist Book Fair at Red & Black Cafe, and while I may not have sold a lot of product, I and pretty much everybody else looked to be having a whole bunch of fun. I haven't seen such a happy crowd of interesting people in a very long time. And I can't think of any time I've ever seen a crowd where so many people seemed to be willing to talk to and substantively interact with people they had never met before. Since I live six whole blocks from Red & Black I didn't exactly have to put myself out to table there. It probably says a lot that even though the book fair officially ended at 6:00, the last of us didn't pack up and shut down our tables until after 9:00 at night.

And let me just take this chance to say that both the folks at Red & Black and the folks from the Black Rose Collective were an absolute pleasure to deal with. Ari in particular was a dynamo. She looked to be in motion the whole day.

I just love Portland on days like this.

And, on a related note, as soon as I deliver their stock, you'll now be able to get my whole line of posters, not to mention my "replace the system" stickers at The Dollar Scholar on Hawthorne. Obviously I'm not exactly getting rich from this. In fact, on some products I'll be losing money just based on printing costs. But I figure that it's worth it. They're cool folks and I'll be able to get more of my beloved posters in front of new readers.

Anyway, I hope to see some of y'all at the Zine Symposium. It looks to be grand ol' time.

What do you do when your satire is being overtaken by reality?

Back in 1999 I left my last corporate job (acting IT director of This Old House Magazine) in a wave of mutual frustration and discord. Fwiw, I had gotten in a vicious feud with the powers that be because I was insisting that the AOL-Time/Warner merger was going to be a disaster and I was refusing to merge our email system with the AOL one, I had been called lazy and/or incompetent by a Time, Inc. V.P. because I hadn't been able to get him and his staff the kinds of subnotebooks I had agreed were an excellent idea, and I had spent about a hundred thousand dollars getting current equipment like real workgroup printers for the departments (such as marketing!) that hadn't been upgraded in five years while telling the art director that it would take a while to get her the kind of dual screen, massively souped up, massively untested Mac she was demanding.

And then they held up my last three thousand dollars worth of paycheck for about two months.

And told me that my health insurance was expiring a month before I had been told it would.

I was pissed. And I decided for the first and last time in my adult life to try to write fiction. Now, I write the worst dialogue of anybody in the known world. And my characterization makes the WWF seem nuanced and subtle. So fiction isn't usually my thing. But in the mood I was in, writing a Swiftian, bitter, "modest proposal" kinda story seemed like just the sort of tonic I needed. First I dashed off a few even worse short stories that the world has been saved from and my mood while writing those was so foul that my apartmentmate was afraid to be in the room with me when I was at the computer. Then I sat down and wrote out a "vast exaggeration" of the world going very wrong. The kind of thing that would happen if our society just flat out lost all common sense. I put lots of work into putting in all sorts of telling details. The freaky ruling at the center of it came from the Ninth Circuit because they have a reputation for that kind of thing. The mechanism for the virus was based on recent DNA findings. My crazy right wingers were based on recent statements by anti-abortion preachers.

And when I was done I felt much better. And I thought that what I had written was pretty doggone funny. In a sick, end of the world, kind of way, of course.

Well, my friend Sara says that I telegraph like Western Union so I'm sure you know what I'm about to say next. By today, about seventy percent of what was in that story has come true. And I just saw an article on Reuters that puts another piece in place, in just about the way my story had predicted.

And since my story ended with the reestablishment of widespread slavery throughout the western world, I'm just not feeling any too secure right about now. And I don't find my story funny these days; not at all.

Folks, we'd better make damned sure that Obama wins and successfully takes office. Because if we don't we're really and truly going to see Western civilization fall. It's just that simple.