The Breaking Time

Is generational identity dead?

Forget this crap. (Also, if someone knows the photographer for this one, tell me)

Something interesting emerged in this discussion over at NSFWCorp about millenials' generational identity (it's locked for subscribers, but it's also $3 a month, so you should totally remedy that). 

Simply put, with a few notable exceptions — socially liberal, used to the internet, economically precarious — I feel largely removed from the popular story about millenials that's developed. No one in my social circle lives with their parents. They all have a ridiculous work ethic and pull long hours at whatever jobs they can find. Rather than delusionally entitled, they're realistic to the point of bleak cynicism.

All generational identities are massive generalizations to begin with, riddled with exceptions. But something has shifted, perhaps to the point where a Baby Boomer-style common culture is impossible.

Previous sweeping "generations" — the Lost, the Greatest, the Silent, the Boomers — came of age in eras of less inequality, broader social institutions, and a more cohesive mass media. Today, generational identity as we know it is probably dead.

This isn't to say that almost everyone 18-30 isn't shaped by some similar experiences, but it's easier to have a common perspective when there are three television channels, a tycoon's son still has to go for a draft physical, or when the entire country goes to war. That world is gone.

Hell, in 1930 12 percent of American men were part of the Freemasons; it's impossible to imagine any single organization today commanding that kind of influence.

Instead, the media environment keeps fragmenting, meaning parts of the same age group are exposed to widely varying cultures depending on their own interests. The increasing class divide further segregates the scions of the better-off into their own universes. The wealthy have always led different lives, of course, but the chasm has widened to the point their young are divorced from the experiences of others.

I've hoped for a strong millenial identity, partly as a counter to the get-thee-to-a-fracking field scoldings we often receive. But maybe the landscape is far too fragmented now for that to ever occur. The cultures that emerge won't have a common identity in any but the broadest sense.

Instead, they will be different shards, adapting to the world facing them in a thousand ways, or heading to hell purely by their own compass.

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

First they came for the libraries

By Damien Williams

Photo by Gregory Maxwell

News came yesterday that radical Islamists have burned the ancient library of Timbuktu.

When I was twelve years old, one of the most important resources for my family was our local library: RL Christian Public Library, on H Street in Washington, DC. Though the area has changed, quite a bit, as any DC Metro-area resident can tell you, it's certainly not the best part of town. Nineteen years ago it was even rougher around the edges.

As funding for city libraries was cut, the operating hours of R.L. Christian were some of the first things on the chopping block. My sisters and I, along with other children from our neighbourhood, wrote essays and went before the DC City Council and explained to them —clearly but forcefully — what this library represented to the neighbourhood.

RL Christian Public Library had free after-school programs for children whose parents worked late. Study resources for those who would need them. A place to be off the street, later in the evening, in a part of town then still coping with regular gang violence. We, the children most affected by this, not our parents, made this case. And they shortened the hours anyway. Eventually RL Christian Public Library closed its doors.

People who know about but don’t fully understand history may ask, "Why do conquerors and fanatics always go for the Libraries?" Our most famous example has always been the Library of Alexandria, but it is by no means the sole instance. And if you take a look at that list, you can see something of a distinction: sometimes invaders burn libraries and loot them, and sometimes they just burn them. Why is that?

It's because a library, more than any other thing humans have ever made, is the physical promise of a wider, more inclusive world.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz at an anti-SOPA protest. Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski/Creative Commons.

By now, I have no doubt my readers know about the tragic suicide of online pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz. The news felt like a punch in the gut; Swartz embodied so many of the finest strengths of our generation. There have been personal remembrances, calls to action, and deserved condemnations. There's not much more I can say.

So I'll leave it at this:

This man was facing over three fucking decades in prison for downloading academic articles. Articles paid for with the public's money but, like a huge chunk of legal cases, aren't available to the public. I have dealt with the justice system for years, and I have seen rapists, murderers, and corrupt public officials who didn't get the book thrown at them half that damn much.

This witch hunt was perpetrated in defense of a body of law that primarily protects those who do nothing, make nothing, contribute nothing, improve nothing, and are, in the end, nothing. The worst part was that it ruined someone who was the living opposite of that, before he even had the chance to defend himself in a trial.

That's wrong. It is the essence of wrong. Some things deserve to be broken, and everything that made this possible should be destined for the goddamn scrap heap.

The Red Umbrella Fund and financing social change

 

So here's an interesting initiative:

"Save us from saviours" is the piercing refrain of a growing human rights movement demanding that sex workers be recognised as more than victims to be rescued or strategic populations to be targeted for public health campaigns. It's likely to strike a nerve among some in the traditional aid and development industry, often criticised for top-down, paternalistic projects.

"Sex workers are discriminated against and their human rights unrecognised around the world, even where sex work isn't illegal," says Nadia van der Linde, co-ordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund, the first global grant-making mechanism set up to give sex workers more control of projects that directly concern them. "Even when they stand up for themselves, it's very hard for them to find support."

The fund, which was launched in April 2012, and will announce this month who will receive its first grants, grew out of a multi-year collaboration between sex worker organisations and interested donors, who first met five years ago to discuss campaigns to curb human trafficking.

Embracing a philosophy of "nothing for us without us", the innovative fund is governed by sex workers, who sit alongside donor representatives on the committees that oversee and manage its work.

More of this, please. When I've mentioned that movements for social change often flounder because of a lack of attention to infrastructure, the lack of things like the Red Umbrella Fund are exactly what I mean. Movements need resources, but that's traditionally an area that would-be activists don't think about. Witness Occupy, for example, which often had no idea to handle the funds it received, and ended up with horrors like meth fiends in control of finance.

That's what happens when an organization, whatever its philosophy, doesn't think about, well, organization. Shepherding resources carefully is even more important for the causes of the poor or ignored, because they're less likely to have patrons capable of just shoving them suitcases full of cash. A lot of worthy causes flounder because no one pays attention to the details.

Furthermore, structuring the organization carefully around access to those resources — instead of treating them like an afterthought — helps to increase the power of the populations who most need them. This looks like a promising model, and I hope to see more of it.

There is no Normal

It's my pleasure to welcome m1k3y to the Breaking Time. Our longtime readers might remember him from our comrades in future dissection, Grinding, and as the other side of the Grinder Dialogues from this site's early days. Here he brings us an energetic, eclectic look at the roots of "normal."

Are you a wizard? Seriously, this is a legitimate question. I recently finished reading Alan Moore's incredible, highly mythic comic series Promethea, and it concludes with a very simple message: all we have ever done is sit by some evolution of the campfire — television is just the latest progression — and tell each other stories, literally imagining the world into existence. Unless you've only sat there passively spellbound, you've been a wizard your whole life, from the moment you mastered the first art, the first technology: language.

Our lives are constructed from language, and the words we use matter. One of these most powerful, spelt, words is Normal. 

Mr. Forbes' powerfully simple axiom, the tagline for this blog, is "There is no They." Last year, as part of our ongoing dialog, I took the liberty of extending it, to what I dubbed its first corollary: There is no Normal.

What is normal? What makes it a word of power? It's that subject that I seek to explore here, in what will be an occasional series of posts examining this subject from a variety of angles. Today, we start with pharmacology and history.

Discussion Time: Election Day

E Pluribus Unum

After 18 months of sound and fury, Election Day is here. I've made my feelings on voting (in short: do it), clear in ways both vicious and kind before, and I don't see a need to repeat them at too much length.

This is a country founded by people who wrote eloquent, high-minded denunciations of the very concept of political parties, while forming political parties as fast as they could go. 

That kind of set the tone, with noble (and not-so-noble) ideas rubbing shoulders with the political knife-fighting required to accomplish anything when a species of evolved apes fight over power.

Susan B. Anthony was arrested in 1872 after voting for that paragon of virtue Ulysses S. Grant. She did this at a time when the women's rights movement was locked in internecine warfare over whether it should engage in mainstream politics or not, a fight every activist movement to this day feels the need to repeat. Poll taxes —  keeping blacks, Native Americans and poor whites disenfranchised — remained legal until the mid-1960s, after people shed blood to get the simple right to fill in boxes on a piece of paper that someone would actually listen to.

Like William Faulkner said, the past isn't even past. In 2012, we still see new versions of the same old fears and hopes.

For me, election day is something akin to feeling a high and a hangover at the same time. This is Black Friday for journalists, so there's a relentless and addictive work pace alongside a lot of camaraderie. As a citizen, it brings me face to face with the best and worst behavior my country can muster. For a second, I think it takes us out of our bubbles with a glimpse at the sheer staggering size and diversity of the electorate. Then the aftermath reinforces those barriers, often in the worst possible ways; I have seen people do and say some of the stupidest things of their lives just after an election.

That's my off-the-cuff rant. This is an open discussion of voting, elections, civic duties, and this campaign in particular.

Keep it smart and keep it civil.

Defending the hicks: A valid life outside New York/LA/SF/Portland/Boston...

Saul Steinberg's classic will, sadly, always be relevant

Here's an interesting piece from former New Yorker Cord Jefferson about finding a home in Los Angeles, and the blindness many Gothamites have about life outside their own borders:

A year ago, New York's Time magazine said the revitalization of downtown LA could be dubbed the neighborhood's "Manhattanization," as if New York invented the idea of clustering bars and restaurants to attract crowds. A few months later, writing about Pacific Standard Time, a massive multi-museum retrospective of the best in LA art from 1945 to 1980, the New York Times called the collection "overcompensation" from a city "where interest in culture starts and ends with movie grosses and who is on the cover of Vanity Fair." "It's corny," art critic Dave Hickey, who also used to direct the Reese Palley gallery in New York, told the Times of the collection. "It's the sort of thing that Denver would do."

When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I'd deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that's far more prevalent.

On a side note, Denver must've mauled Dave Hickey's family at some point in the past. Sheesh.

While I like Jefferson's piece quite a bit, it's worth noting that rural areas and small/mid-size cities get this sort of crap directed at them constantly, and from more corners.

How radicals took over the mainstream, 1860s style

                                          

A fascinating piece in the leftist Jacobin magazine details how the formation of the Free Soil and original Republican parties were one of the more aggressively radical projects in American political history, and has some big points about basic political effectiveness:

At each stage of their project, from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party and finally the Republican Party, progressively broader coalitions were formed around an emerging ideology of free labor that merged antislavery principles with the economic interests of ordinary Northern whites.

The outer layers of these coalitions attracted voters and politicians who lacked the hard 
abolitionist principles of the militants, and in a racist society it was inevitable that many of 
the converts to Free Soil would vaunt theirs as the “true white man’s party.”

But the original nucleus of radicals – despite their own time-bound attitudes – lent the 
project an inner egalitarian spirit, visible in party campaigns for black suffrage and civil 
rights across the North. And when the moment of mass radicalization finally arrived in the 
wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, these abolitionists stood triumphantly at the heart of the networks that became the new Republican Party. “Our position is now rather enviable,” wrote Giddings in 1854. “We lead the hosts of freedom.”

Today on the radical left, there is a widespread allergy to political strategy as such. There is far more communion with the countercultural legacy of Garrison than with the political acumen of Frederick Douglass, who by 1852 had become secretary of the Free Soil Party, commenting that “what is morally right is not at all times politically possible.”

The common narrative of the pre-Civil War era focuses on the tension between Northern and Southern states over slavery, but abolition was still an unwelcome idea throughout many parts of the country. In 1844, a mob beat abolitionist John Murray Spear and left him for dead, in Maine.

But in roughly two decades, people like Douglass, Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln took that idea from radical to a viable part of the country's political mainstream.

They did it by wading into the muck. The 1860 Republican platform is full of planks (mail! infrastructure! tariffs! homesteading!) that don't have a huge amount to do with the radicals' original goal. Some of these were good ideas in their own right, others were sops to one constituency or another or compromises (framing anti-slavery efforts in Kansas as a belief in state's rights) intended to bring their more sweeping goals a bit closer. There's no reason radicals can't use the boil the frog approach too.

One can only imagine the frustration Douglass felt during all this. He had broken free from torture and slavery only to have to put up with the crap required to get those "outer layer" groups — many of them quite racist — on board. But he did it anyway because it built towards the day when slavery would be wiped out entirely.

So instead of leaving en masse, the radicals stayed in the coalition, and their influence is visible in things like this 1860 campaign song:

They knew exactly where they were heading.

"Incrementalism" gets a lot of flak but unless you can conjure armies or "shut down society" levels of popular support, every approach is going to be incremental.

The abolitionists in the 1840s simply didn't have the numbers or the power to end slavery, and no amount of moral protest or personal righteousness was going to change that. Reversing that situation required getting a bunch of people they didn't exactly agree with into a coalition that wasn't particularly coherent. It worked.

Bill Friday's ignored fight against tuition hikes

Photo by David Wilson, UNC Greensboro

The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.

 -Article IX, North Carolina Constitution

"I'm really concerned that what we're doing now is making price and the ability to pay the first standard that must be met by young people to go to college. That's not what built this state; that attitude did not make North Carolina great."

-William C. Friday, 2012 

Former UNC President William Friday died early this morning at the age of 92. A flood of tributes naturally followed.

For those of you from outside NC, Friday was responsible for giving the state a world-class, affordable college system. This helped to make education more widely available, especially in a state with many poor and rural residents. A lot of us working class kids who ended up going to a good college for a price we can conceivably pay off in our lifetime owe him our thanks.

But among all the accolades, one thing that's being largely forgotten is that Friday spent the last decade of his life fighting hard against a major trend in higher education, including actions carried out by many of the same administrators currently singing his praises.

The ignoring of Friday's advice on this issue illuminates one of the main causes behind the increasing difficulty of accessing higher education: in his lifetime, low tuition went from sacrosanct to expendable.

A proud "low tuition man," Friday called the trend of institutions constantly ratcheting up their prices "dangerous." At my own school, Appalachian State, tuition began rising sharply around 2000. It was still a relative bargain during my time there, but the perpetually increasing cost did cause some real difficulties of the "having food and paying rent" variety.

As one of the architects of a better South, Friday saw widely-available knowledge as a way to overcome poverty and isolation. The belief in public education was one of the things the industrial nation-states got, on the whole, right: it's hard for us to imagine a time when even basic literacy was the province of the elite. But now that achievement is receding in places from the South to Europe, and student debt exceeds credit card debt.

So among all the deserved tributes, let's remember that a good portion of the people doing the talking ignored Friday's advice when it was most important, and continue to. Let's also hope there are more voices against those too shortsighted to pay for a functioning society.