THREEDOM! (#13) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
There’s a significant pleasure to this month’s newsletter going out a bit late, because it means I get to tell you folks about how I spent the start of my September. Instead of revising this content, I met last Thursday with members of Tomás Carrasquilla’s living family, and learned to play a card game that was his favourite. This past month, as I discuss below, I’ve met many wonderful people while broadening the scope and resources for my translation work. But this was… on another level, well and truly.
The card game is tresillo, from “tres y yo” for the three players (and dealer, who can deal themself in after asking the others a question they’re obligated to answer truthfully). It doesn’t exist anymore—the closest is a European variant that blends it into a more complicated contract-based game—but it was Carrasquilla’s favourite, and popular in his time. The game has similarities to hearts and euchre, but with a lot more theatre, including names for each player-role and a lot of etiquette around how you ask for and deal cards, and more cards whose value changes depending on trump.
(I’m currently waiting on delivery of a deck, so I can teach locals how to play as well.)
But what I really loved about the experience, above and beyond the kind welcome I received from the family, is how the experience left me feeling like I was connecting with my French roots, too—because there’s something uncanny about the way folks here with strong Old-World ties live and interact, and the way that I recall parts of my extended family in Quebec living and meeting up in my youth. My most immediate slice of Quebecois family was unfortunately too much estranged from my household for me to be able to lean into that half of my heritage in Canada, but I think that cultural hole goes a long way toward explaining what I love so much about the home I’ve been trying to make for myself here. If I’d been able to live a more French-Canadian life, would I have found my place sooner? Set up contented camp in Montreal or a rural northern community? Oh, who knows. But I do love the feeling of home that this murky cultural baggage stirs up in me here and now.
I haven’t become complacent, though. (Ha. As if that word could ever be used in the same sentence as me, no?) Quite the opposite! Meeting so many wonderful people has actually left me in a heightened sense of anxiety, a fear of letting everyone down now by doing a bad job. I’m currently champing at the bit to make revisions for a second edition of The Rifle, and Other Stories (mostly to the plant glossary, but a few fun Easter eggs also revealed themselves in my visits, so there will be touch-ups to the Antioqueñismos and a couple of words in the text itself: congrats and thank you to everyone who owns what will surely be a rare first edition soon!). This week, I’m going to Santo Domingo for five days, ideally to finish the first draft translation of La marquesa de Yolombó. If I pull it off, I’ll have plenty of time before January publication (after I take photos in Yolombó during its post-New Years festival) to make sure every nuance in my translation is loyal to the original, and a delight in English, too.
There’s a real necessity for this dedicated translation crunch, though, because September also marks the start of other projects that are going to take up plenty of my time, and require transport to other work locations. I have a stronger “beat” now at OnlySky: resident Internationalist and Futurist! And you’re going to see more multimedia content from me soon. That’s also why this newsletter is a bit delayed; I had a lot of catch-up to do this weekend, to clear my slate for the new schedule ahead. (Not least of which because I promised to review ten books this month, nine of which are for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Award. That was, ah… not wise, but exciting!)
Still, it boggles the mind that this newsletter project is now in its second year—huzzah! And I hope it bodes well that I’ve been able to build constancy with at least something in such a tumultuous run of years in publishing.
Thank you ever so much for still journeying with me in this, and so many other projects. Your assistance, whether through Patreon, or Ko-Fi, or just a kind word of support on various social media, has buoyed me through many a difficult season—and I really hope that some of the content here has been a delight for you as well.
May your own Septembers be filled with the promise of better days ahead.
Until October, then, as always—
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
M
Table of Contents
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A feast (M2)
A recipe: Blueberry Lime Bundt Cake (M3)
Three international crises
China, and “tankie” disinformation (I1)
Russia, and European energy (I2)
Pakistan, and disaster recovery (I3)
Three podcasts of note
“Four Roads to Cassadaga”, Ghost Church, by Jamie Loftus (P1)
“The secret to upward mobility: Friends”, The Indicator from Planet Money, NPR (P2)
“Strategy & Degrowth”, This Is Hell!, with Chuck Mertz (P3)
Three stories from Santo Domingo
Through the eyes of a paisa (S1)
El pueblo de las tres efes: feo, frío y faldudo (S2)
Translating Carrasquilla (S3)
Three one-word-title films
RRR (F1)
Prey (F2)
Nope (F3)
M1. A quotation
“There is a common saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents we were allotted, and that they were given to us by chance; yet we can be born to whomever we wish. There are households of the most distinguished intellects: choose the one into which you'd like to be adopted, and you'll inherit not just the name but also the actual property, which is not to be hoarded in a miserly or mean spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become.”
—Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life” (trans. Gareth D. Williams)
P1. “Four Roads to Cassadaga”, Ghost Church, by Jamie Loftus
Spiritualism might be my least favourite form of supernatural belief, which is why I forced myself to give Jamie Loftus’s Ghost Church a listen. I’ll say upfront that I wasn’t enamoured by this podcast, but I also didn’t expect to be. Loftus is a thoughtful host, and here she’s clear from the outset about not really knowing what she believes—meaning, she hopes her atheist grandfather is wrong about the afterlife, and she has a soft spot for “woo”, including annual or semi-annual fortune readings for comfort.
That’s what I was really listening for: to better understand a demographic neither religious nor atheist—and by that, I don’t mean the spiritualists Loftus was researching, but people like Loftus herself. The people trying to move through our world with a sense of magic and “maybe” beyond its empirical edges.
In this series, Loftus is generous in her treatment of historical spiritualists, while exploring American Spiritualism both past and present. The podcast is framed around her experiences in a town where the tradition thrives, with a certification program and plenty of protections against meddling and sceptical outsiders. There, Loftus seeks to understand one subset of human that doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, but which does think our spirits hang out on Earth after death.
It’s not just that I consider spiritualism a wishy-washy cop-out, wherein humans keep one foot planted on either side of theism and atheism. I also regard it as a predatory con. As much as some might find card readings, seances, and other psychic sessions soothing and restorative (Loftus included), I simply see a lot of desperate people tricked out of their money with promises of reconnecting with loved ones or learning more about their future from “spirits” at large. As much as many larger, organized religions have also done incredible harm, I think it’s the bald-faced nature of the spiritualist grift that explains my particular ire for this faith tradition.
And yet, I’m also deeply uneasy around sites of righteous anger, my own most of all. After all, people believe and do many things that I consider to be in extreme error. But when those beliefs and actions bring me to impatient fury? Then they’re living rent-free in my head. I touched on this two months ago, when I wrote about how much the US legal situation with respect to bodily autonomy and safety for queer people had brought me to a breaking point. It is incredibly painful to know how many people support the world being an unsafe place for others—in the US, as in so many other places I write about for OnlySky. But to dehumanize those who perpetuate harm is to deprive myself of the important knowledge that it is, indeed, humans taking up these terrible political positions, humans doing these terrible things to one another every day. If I want a better world, I cannot allow myself to pretend that something other than average people are responsible for the one we have today.
So, I listened to Loftus’s Ghost Church. Her history isn’t bad. She does a decent job charting the biography of the Fox sisters, whose childhood tricks were credulously received by adults, and whose movement strongly influenced American Spiritualism. However, Loftus has a soft spot for female hucksters (as a kind of counterpoint to the cultural prejudice against female authority that lets women become passive mediums, rather than proactive theorists), and this partiality makes her come down pretty hard on Houdini for his work debunking them. To me, this is a little like celebrating the earliest known Ponzi schemes—which weren’t by Charles Ponzi, but by Adele Spitzeder and Sarah Howe, with Howe in particular preying on women who lacked formal banking options—as a kind of “girl power”.
(But as you know, I am notoriously cranky about “we need 50% female CEOs” feminism. It’s deeply reductive to read worldly activism through gender binaries.)
Another episode finds Loftus addressing the Indigenous appropriation in American Spiritualist movements, and that’s more in line with the thoughtfulness I’ve enjoyed in some of her other outings. The most telling episode for me, though, involved four stories of how women in this small town came to their faith, and how they’ve experienced judgment for their beliefs. If you’re going to give this podcast a try, I’d recommend “Four Roads to Cassadaga” as the most useful entry point. In it, Loftus shares the stories of four women who felt dismissed within their strongly religious or atheist upbringings. The spiritualist camp in Cassadaga, and its three- to four-year certification process before one can start working toward becoming an ordained minister, offered them all community—but more importantly, a sense of acceptance.
Into what, exactly? Well, that’s where the wishy-washy part emerges. As Loftus notes,
“At present, American spiritualism appears to be at this midpoint. They still primarily work with former Christians who are layering spiritualist ideas onto the flavour of Christianity they grew up in, but it’s not a must.”
These are older white women, by and large—and boomers, too—but Loftus says there’s an abiding role for spiritualism in other US generations, too. When I listen to her generosity with their stories, and her receptivity to various readings and sessions with certified and independent mediums all across town, I can certainly see why. It’s not loneliness, exactly, but an ache for connection, and to be seen for the gifts we have—for life to provide something more—that such movements will always rise up to fill.
I still have a strong aversion to spiritualism. I have no patience for or interest in tarot readings, psychics, astrology, reiki, seances, and the like. But I do want to remember that humans come to these hobbies and even professions from a wide range of experiences, and with intentions far beyond the grift. If folks who believe in such things also make up our shared world, then we need to try to understand the impact of their beliefs on our shared spaces. It does matter how we bridge the gap, then—maybe not between life and the afterlife, but certainly between one life and another.
S1. Through the eyes of a paisa
In August, I visited Santo Domingo for the first time, to present myself and my translation work to the Casa Museo de Tomás Carrasquilla. The bus takes about an hour and a half through twisty, thickly forested mountain roads, and at one juncture (for added ease!) runs right along the highway outside my apartment complex.
I took a friend of mine, a fellow who sells little cups of coffee and tea, sweets and smokes, on the street every early morning. As he noted on the bus ride out, this was his first outing since he’d lost his leg in an accident seven years ago. Before then, he’d worked and moved about in plenty of small towns, in many departments in Colombia, and enjoyed plenty of their seasonal delights. But a person’s world can shrink very quickly with a change to status quo. The adjustment period was difficult, and always will be, he tells me—as much as he happily identifies as “El Mocho”, or “Stumpy”.
We left at 6:30 a.m., and from Bello, the little town just north of Medellín, we moved through a few suburban and near-rural townships before the air and the vista changed—the bus rising high into remote and seemingly endless rolling mountains. It’s easy to forget, living closer to the city, just how much biodiversity can exist in a forested area. I’d be remiss if I just spoke of palms and pines, because everywhere I looked, I saw cohabitating, co-thriving multitudes of plant life, from exquisite, vividly coloured flowers and creepers, right up to towering grasses, ferns, and trees with all kinds of intricate leaf and branch patterns. And the air was so fresh, so sweet, so clean.
I could have ridden that bus into the mountains forever, and been at peace.
Santo Domingo is nestled especially high in the mountains, a half-klick above Medellín, so even with an overcast sky that morning, the town’s main square, with its traditional Catholic church on one side of a central park, around which Spanish-colonial two-storey buildings were otherwise arranged, was bright and inviting on our arrival. We took large tintos (black drip coffees) for some 30 cents Canadian apiece, at café tables that let us listen to the rumble of brightly coloured chivas busses as they arrived with farmers from surrounding fincas, steadying heavy burlap bags of coffee beans and other market wares beside them, or the clip-clop of hooves from horses ridden into town by young boys and old men alike: the latter wearing ruanas (Colombian ponchos) against the early chill, like men straight out of a Juan Valdéz coffee commercial from the 1980s; all with wide-brimmed hats against the early light.
I could have sipped coffee at that café forever, and been at peace.
My original plan had been to visit the Casa Museo first thing—and I almost managed it, too! But after taking my photo outside the building, my friend got excited. He suggested we just do a quick walk around the main square, and—silly fool that I was, I didn’t imagine that he’d be up for walking much more in one go on his crutches. Oh, but I learned my lesson in presumption well! He was so excited to see all the Spanish colonial homes—their grandeur and sheer size leaving the most striking impression on him—so we toured most every side street in that little mountaintop pueblo. We admired all the plants, and paint jobs, and works of street art, and stones, and decór, and the old secondary church down a ways, for nigh on two hours. The Canadian in me was a little anxious about the hours for my original task slipping away, but I tried to remind myself that Colombian time would work just as well.
And… it did, sort of. But the Casa Museo was terrifically busy by the time that my friend had counted out the length of all the neighbouring houses by their windows and foundation stones, and deliberated on whether or not it would be all right to ask to see a beautiful bit of colonial infrastructure from the interior (it would have been; the neighbours were all very courteous and welcoming—only, they already seemed to have visitors touring the space, so we left them alone). I was so happy to finally meet Carlos, and later Ángela, the curators of that lovely museum filled with Carrasquilla’s books and familial items—but goodness, was our time there ever rushed.
I could have idled there forever, and been at peace.
We had to leave on the 3 p.m. bus, but I already knew that I’d be back—and often—so my heart was rather full. The only hitch had been lunch, and there another test of patience had ensued, as I deferred to my friend, the older and very male person who wanted to lead the way, to find us a place to eat at what I had already suspected was too late an hour. Sure enough, the one street-level restaurant was filled by the time he’d agreed we should eat, and we soon found that other recommendations were on second-floor sites he couldn’t access. Even the little main-floor shop we finally found had a high front step that his crutches couldn’t surmount, so I asked the staff if we could take our plates to the curb, and we ate contentedly there—sharing, as it turned out, with one of the very many complacent and spoiled town dogs that knows to expect their cut of any meal taken out in public. It was a simple meal, and sadly lacking in the classic side of richly stewed beans one looks forward to when wandering the Antioqueño countryside, but still—very satisfying in its rustic nature.
I could’ve eaten simple rustic fare in that town forever, and been at peace.
After we got back from our day high in that remote Spanish-colonial pueblo, where we had listened to and walked among such tranquility of nature, my friend started talking excitedly about our next trip, to a little valley-floor pueblo called Cisneros, in October. I’m interested in the history of 19th-century and early 20th-century train lines tied to the place. My friend is excited about the wading springs and shallows for which the town is better known by tourists. I hope we can find a way for him to enjoy a splash, if not a full swim, in one of those “charcos” closer to the main town. I know it’s never easy, to have one’s world reduced. My own, for different reasons, has certainly gained some complicated constraints in recent years.
But if I can stretch them even just enough to make more routine visits to places like Santo Domingo? I know I’ll have found my peace.
I1. China, and “tankie” disinformation
The world, of course, is much bigger than any given township. As much as I’d love simply to lean into the small, full slices of life one finds in places like Santo Domingo, my work and other connections forever bind me to other cadences of discourse, too.
One of those “other cadences” came this past month from a family member who’s always throwing themself into one deep conviction after another. It’s a matter of nervous energy, really, and it pains me because I can see in it a raw desire to belong, and to have a clear terrain of expertise and authority, after being bumped off a normal path to either’s acquisition. I can always tell, too, when this family member is coming to me fresh from arguments elsewhere, but by the time they’ve messaged me they’re usually hopped up on a species of righteousness intent on performing “insider knowledge”, and it’s difficult to know whether the best response is to engage with the content of their speech or to seek to de-escalate the overall mood.
Why engage at all? Well, obviously I care about them. But it’s deeper and more selfish than that, too. In the extremes of their manic energy, I also see echoes of my own manic or mixed-state moods, which leaves me with a certain dread that, wild and erratic as this family member often is, I probably seem just as over-the-top in my declarations, too. Am I not also struggling to belong? Would I not also hope that someone would be kind enough to accept me as I am?
All of which is to say, though, that I wasn’t surprised to find this family member sharing full-on “tankie” rhetoric this past month, with a focus both on Russia and China. From an sociological perspective, it was interesting to catch a glimpse of their info silo: the active disinformation that this person was soaking up from propaganda campaigns trying to blame the Ukrainian invasion’s brutal toll on Zelenskyy, and insisting that Uyghurs in China are not actually being persecuted.
My family member is self-aware enough to articulate what makes them so susceptible to this kind of disinformation, which is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking. When they first wrote me in this latest case, it was with a sense of relief at having seen a Twitter comment supposedly debunk Chinese abuses of religious minorities. They were so excited because, as they said at the time, “Everyone thought I was crazy” and “People didn’t want to talk to me”—but now this person on Twitter had given them a feeling of vindication. I had to tread carefully, in pointing out that we should be cautious about letting the rush from feeling affirmed shape how we process new intel. And they agreed, and came down from initial euphoria into a more coherent state.
(On Friday, I should add, I also posted an update on China for OnlySky, and it includes the latest UN Human Rights Council report on the situation there: very damning.)
We both grew up in authoritarian households, but they never got out of that shadow of authoritarianism. Instead, they replaced the idea of a “strong man” given to them by an immature father with state-Communist figures they consider to be stronger. They’ve literally told me that part of why they admire at least one pretty heinous historical figure relates to said leader being much more accomplished and educated than their own father—whom they enjoy lobbing wild political opinions at, in keeping with a desire to “school” any older male family figures in debate.
So. A lot of psychological trauma to unpack there—and yet, also maybe not so much at all. I’ve met plenty of folks like this: QAnon, Flat-Earther, and similar extremists. There’s a lot of damage, estrangement, and aching to be vindicated (especially after being further ostracized for extremist beliefs) behind it all.
And the disinformation networks that exist online? Well, they obviously don’t help. In some ways, folks like this family member are not unlike the desperate people who turn to mediums for connection, clarity, and a kind of secret knowledge that lets them feel like they have an edge over everyone else. In forums where such tankies thrive, stumping from comfortable Western spheres for Putin, extolling the virtues of an iron-fisted Communist state, fetishizing war, and even disseminating false claims about the plight of Uyghurs to champion China, too, a whole pool of specialized knowledge is aggregated and circulated, to be tossed Gish-Gallop-style at anyone startled by their offhand assertion of holding radical political positions.
And if an outsider needs a moment to process some of those bizarre claims? Clearly that’s just further proof that the outsider isn’t as educated as you are on this subject, and therefore that their counterpoints aren’t valid. Until they’ve read and seen everything you’ve seen, in that walled-off silo of fellow tankies fighting the good fight against the sheeple, how could they possibly fairly judge your point of view?
There’s so much loneliness in the world. So much need to be affirmed, to be seen, to feel valued and upheld as an expert in some theme.
And what a world of added harm all that inner aching’s wrought.
Would that we could bypass our need to feel like authorities in order, simply, to exist.
F1. RRR (2022)
One reason I quite enjoy iconic Bollywood (and Tollywood, and Mollywood, etc.) is because most of its films arrive with full confidence in all their seasoned tropes. Truly, some classic stories are retold in Indian films more often than Austen’s once-every-five-years novel adaptations—and yet the target audience, far from lamenting some mythic loss of creativity and originality in its mainstream cinema, loves and leans into the traditionalism. The familiarity, in other words, is the point.
If you’ve never watched one of these theatrical events, I highly recommend RRR as an accessible summer blockbuster. Yes, yes, it’s 185 minutes—typical for these sweeping epics—but it is an action-packed 185 minutes, and you’ll enjoy the fight scenes at the end as much as the over-the-top Herculean fight scene near the start.
What makes RRR such a “romp” is partly the sheer charisma and bravura of its male leads, two superman-level fighters on different sides of British-controlled 1920s India, drawn together by one man’s quest to reclaim a lost “lamb” from his village: a child stolen by colonizers from her brutalized mother. (If you follow Tollywood, you might recognize Ram Teja from 2018’s Rangasthalam, where he plays a similarly larger-than-life role; and Jr NTR from 2015’s Temper, where he plays another uniformed fighter who undergoes a transformation.)
But the film is also decisive and matter-of-fact about its 1920s history, which allows it to move at an engaging clip through a wealth of stories involving British brutality, colonial suffering, and the struggle for honour and integrity between both (with, of course, a goofy, over-the-top courtship plot thrown in: a Bollywood standard!). There’s no handwringing here about the psychology of empire, because no one needs that nuance teased out, or attempts at justification entertained. The British were brutal. The colonized suffered—and complexly so, with some actively serving their oppressors, some just trying to survive, and some choosing to resist. And so, each key beat comes to us unvarnished, but also containing a whole world of familiar backstory. This offers a perfect backdrop for delightful fight scenes, melodramatic declarations, fiendish deeds, laugh-out-loud romance, and the promise of heroic triumph.
I think what I love most about Bollywood and its many regional variants is this sincerity. There’s no self-conscious check and balance in such films. No holding back at all. History exists! Tropes abide for a reason! What matters, then, is not that we try to be original, but that we try to live out our own iterations of tales as old as time to the best of our ability. Every love story should be the love story. (Why not?) And every tale of Ris(ing) Roar(ing) and Revolt(ing) should be treated as the epic struggle that it is.
That, at least, is the splendidly fulfilled promise of RRR.
F2. Prey (2022)
Not unlike RRR, the latest Predator-franchise film, Prey, also leans wholeheartedly into its fictionalized-historic world, and doesn’t waste time equivocating about, say, the brutal treatment of natives by French trappers in 1719. Granted, it’s also not entirely accurate about the terrain of its main cast (i.e., it’s set in Cheyenne territory, but with a Comanche Nation that actually lived further south), but at least its characters speak in Comanche—so, baby steps toward accuracy. (The very first Predator film also had an Indigenous character, which wasn’t used as comic relief but also wasn’t pinned down.)
What I especially enjoyed about this sci-fi thriller, which focusses on young Naru, who wants to be a hunter but hasn’t yet managed the craft, is how little Prey relies on the rest of the franchise to do its worldbuilding, around an alien species that drops in on other worlds to test its own warriors against the best a given planet has to offer. Some parts of Predator lore are important—like the fact that a Predator won’t attack an unarmed person, or someone it otherwise doesn’t see as a threat; and the fact that its sensors are weak around masked heat signatures—but these binding threads for the franchise are all deftly woven into the main tale.
Even better, the narrative structure is well balanced between its “sides”. As the film progresses, we watch our Predator move from smaller to meatier prizes, alongside Naru growing braver and more adept while she tries to help her tribe respond to what at first seems like a simple wildcat attack. Other food-chain predation cycles also gain a cinematic spotlight, but so too does an important interspecies relationship: human kinship with dogs. Similarly, the film also celebrates other ways of contributing to society, ones that have nothing to do with the hunt. Balance in all things!
(There’s also an unnatural predation cycle in Prey, in the form of mass-slaughtered buffalo—although that part is out of sync with the history of white settlers engaging in mass kill-offs over a century later. A lot of colonial and native history has definitely been compressed here, to get a larger point across.)
Granted, Naru is played wonderfully by Amber Midthunder, who fully inhabits every aching scene, but it really is this patient and mature mirroring of plotlines that creates the suspension of disbelief needed for a life-or-death struggle between an alien with advanced technology and an 18th-century Native American with a bow and arrow and a blade. It helps, too, that the film takes very seriously its protagonist’s belief that she’s engaging in a spiritual rite of passage by fighting for her life against this foe. The story of that ritual has meaning for her, and the film gives us every reason to believe that choosing which stories will define us is what matters in the fray.
S2. El pueblo de las tres efes: feo, frío y faldudo
I’m going to include many facets of Santo Domingo in future translation work, but there’s one difficult period that I need to handle with care. It was important for me to learn what Colombia’s hardest decades had been like in this small, tranquil pueblo… but I also don’t want to sensationalize this beautiful place for outsiders, by giving North American readers too many sordid details from a time, some two decades past, when guerrillas set up shop in and around this remote mountain village—as they did in all the little towns in this region, whether or not they were closely connected to highways or other key resource routes—and terrorized the locals.
This book is a perfect example of that historical delicacy, because El pueblo de las tres efes (The Town of Three Fs, which refers to three words that begin with F) was written by Claudia Arroyave, a Colombian who lives in the US and works there as a journalist. She could have published these stories about Santo Domingo in English, but the work remains in Spanish only—including the heart-wrenching tale called “El hombre del corazón más grande”, or “The man with the biggest heart”.
The title is a work of misdirection, giving you to believe that it refers to a victim of the worst local killer, a man who wandered the streets with impunity some twenty years ago, assassinating Santo Domingo’s citizens as he pleased. But in fact, the title refers to the killer himself, a man whose crimes finally caught up with him after he assassinated a woman in a position of authority for refusing to continue to serve him at a bar. There, he would often terrorize the locals, brandishing his gun and demanding a specific song to be played over and over, and harassing the women and robbing the men. But after one woman’s murder on New Year, he was killed in turn—and that’s when the medical examiner remarked, with great surprise, that this killer had had the biggest heart he’d ever seen.
Today, the site of that woman’s murder, and so much related tyranny, goes by a new name. It’s a lovely little café in a long line of similar in the main Santo Domingo square. There, old locals and bright-eyed regional tourists alike will sit and take their tinto or pola (a casual word for beer) in peace, because that’s the ambience this little town, like ever so many other pueblos in the region, finally knows—and for which it most richly deserves, by outsiders especially, to be best known.
P2. “The secret to upward mobility: Friends”, The Indicator from Planet Money, NPR
Although the vast majority of my podcast listening tends toward leftist discourse (and I mean leftist, not liberal), I do keep apprised of many mainstream programs, including NPR’s Planet Money, which routinely fascinates me in its affectation of journalistic neutrality. The Indicator in particular always manages an upbeat tone when talking about devastating news, and really wants listeners to feel as though the hosts are merely observing rather than making editorial selections from the full range of economic data topics available to them. But of course they’re making selections! And of course we’re none of us objective! We all have subject positions, and they always shape our interpretation of new intel. The danger, when trying to dialogue with people from different subject positions, is not that differences exist; rather, it emerges in either of us (or both!) refusing to acknowledge our own starting points. How on Earth can we hope to share in knowledge, and build a deeper mutual understanding, if still harbouring the belief that personal views are ever shaped by pure reason alone?
I was raised in a conservative upper-lower-class household, for instance—always just verging on lower-middle class—and that class precarity especially entrenched a fear of not doing everything right and therefore (upon failing at a given task) deserving to lose everything. I also grew up in Toronto, though, which meant that even with my class precarity I had a lot more exposure to the broader world by virtue of my surroundings. I always felt more comfortable in worlds where I and my culture are not centered, and tremendously uncomfortable in overwhelmingly Anglo-white spaces. And yet, I spent some 14 years in Kitchener-Waterloo, a community with a stark delineation between its white demographics (at the universities, and in the German-heritage townships themselves) and its wide range of immigrant communities—one of which first introduced me to Colombia’s distinct approach to so many worldly issues.
Even though I was decidedly left-leaning in my politics early on, it took moving to Colombia to unlearn a lot of my conservative anxieties about social-contract trespass. (And I still only manage any of this by the tremendous grace, kindness, and support of so many others still firmly rooted in that social contract—so, I contain a bundle of contradictions for sure!) But these days, I feel very comfortable in my firmly leftist, anti-neoliberal humanist positioning. Am I an “anarchist”, too? Sure, by some definitions. But that movement has many subgroups, many forms of real-world praxis, so while many advocate for a complete removal of the state, I think it’s more accurate to say that I’m focussed on the interim politics of improving worldly agency. And that sometimes means contending with existing state structures, to reduce the harm they do while they’re still here—even if I’m also fantasizing about, say, a world of hyper-regional global governance (the likes of which I’ll write about for OnlySky soon, as an alternative to the nationalism rising everywhere).
So. That’s my subject position. Those are my politics. And even as I strive to hold opposing views in tension—everything from the spiritualist sympathizers I noted in P1, and the tankies I talked about in I1, and plenty more besides—I will always come to new intel informed by my pre-existing ideological relationships.
As will everyone around me. And a perfect example of existing biases was on display in an episode of The Indicator this month, titled “The Secret to Upward Mobility: Friends”. In this episode, the hosts discuss research that illustrates the utter lie of “meritocracy”. It’s really not what you know, or what you deserve, that determines your success. It’s who you know. The (literal) class of people you’re in contact with, the people you’re most regularly exposed to, will best determine your chances of class mobility and a life of greater comfort than you’ve known.
(And boy howdy, don’t I know that feeling! I would not be here without all of you.)
But here’s the thing about that episode. I was so ready for this piece to springboard from said research into punchy observations about how Western societies could mitigate that “friend” effect through systemic reforms, both to improve overall class mobility and also to better ensure quality of life across the board.
Silly, silly me, though—because in a move that felt like it came squarely out of the 1840s (when charity by the rich and humility by the poor were the highest and most Christian virtues one could perform), the hosts instead talked about how to ensure that more poor people could connect with rich people, essentially to bid directly through them for a better life. Classic neoliberal solutions, in other words: just keep pushing for more rich people, through private enterprise, to directly (and inevitably inequitably) take up the role of social benefactor. That’ll fix it!
Gosh, if only we as a society had some other recourse.
Something other than the arbitrary good will of your local millionaires and billionaires to rely upon for your own leg up from difficult circumstances.
Is anything else coming to you?
Sure is a doozy, I know. But maybe someone, somewhere, with just the right subject position and experience set, will be better able to think this problem through.
M2. A feast
Friends are wonderful, mind you—which is why I was especially chuffed to get to celebrate some of mine with a recent pasta party chez moí. It was my first time having folks over in two years (thank you, pandemic!), and a fun opportunity to try out new recipes. I mad a strawberry semifreddo, which worked marvellously well as a low-sugar substitute for ice cream (even though the only local heavy whipping cream will not fluff up to full glorious peaks for me; and a chocolate espresso Bundt cake), along with a caprese salad, an antipasto spread, and an adequate sausage and beef lasagna.
The antipasto was a lot of fun precisely because items like pickles and sun-dried tomatoes are not well known here. Imagine having to explain what a pickle is to someone for the first time! (And to anticipate your follow-up question: burgers here use little sticks of potato-chip to provide that lovely crunch instead.) All my guests brought wine, save for my dearest friend (seen behind me in the photo), who showed up with a little cactus buddy for my lone plant, and fruit (on my request) to complement the cake and semifreddo. She is a gem of a human being.
All in all, it was a wonderful experience, even if it also served to remind me of the absence of similar elsewhere in my life. Pandemic has exacerbated points of isolation, and my circumstances have definitely made that isolation even more difficult. When I went to Santo Domingo, though, I gained a rush similar to the one from this pasta party: I felt part of something again, and that sense of belonging is as lovely as it is bittersweet. Why bittersweet? Because it also leaves me with a fear of losing it again.
How wonderful it would be, if I could feel settled somewhere for the long term—and be able to share that sense of joy more frequently with others, too. But I’m not there yet. It’s still all bright points in a field of uncertainty; little nibbles from a plate of plenty; fleeting moments of happiness from sporadic communities of care.
So we press on—but deeply affirmed, at least, in the end we hope to reach.
I2. Russia, and European energy
I’m not going to rehash any breaking news here, but I do want to reflect on the normalization of economic peril in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and how much this is starting to feel like the most rational response to life writ large.
Russia has of course upped its countersanctions against Europe by shutting off and otherwise reducing energy services. At first, the shut-offs were treated as mere technical problems: a matter of damage to the pipes in need of long-term repair. This was nonsense, of course; we all know it’s a response to Western sanctions.
And yet, of course, these sudden shut-offs, especially as Europe heads into the fall and winter, have caused a range of problems across mainland Europe, depending on each country’s level of reliance on Russian imports. France is pretty energy-secure, being that it draws much more from nuclear power, but Germany and Italy are more gas-dependent in general, and have to adopt austerity measures while trying to change their energy relationship with Russia as soon as possible.
Now, I have a friend in Germany who’s optimistically reframed the issue as her household needing to lean into sweaters and slippers more this winter. And that’s a good attitude to have, but we should also give the bigger picture a moment’s pause. Not for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, we’re seeing pretty explicit indicators of the profound fragility of our global economic networks. First grain exports (or rather, the lack thereof) introduced the general public this year to just how far-reaching our food network truly is, and illustrated how a war in Eastern Europe can easily spell famine for countries in Northern Africa. Energy crises like the one created now by Russia (a warring nation striving to keep potential future opponents divided and at bay) also reveal the profound and pressing downside to not having shifted to cleaner energy solutions sooner. And it’s probably no surprise that “degrowth”, a policy of de-prioritizing GDP and redistributing wealth to build greener and more equitable economies, is finally entering more mainstream conversations. After all, who wouldn’t want to be less reliant on international markets that can jack up your local prices in a heartbeat, based on war games you have no control over?
But perhaps the biggest, ongoing lesson of all is one that—for me and for my generation, at least—started not with 9/11 but with the 2007-2009 recession. 9/11 was certainly destabilizing, but it was also a madness of a media event that stressed its own exceptionalism. A fluke! We’d get back on track eventually, right? Surely 9/11 was just a wake-up call to be more engaged, more worldly, more on top of things.
When the recession hit a few years later, it hit fast, and my generation, many fresh out of university programs, saw jobs dry up overnight. Even then, though, there was hope at first that these industries would bounce back. They didn’t, of course. Instead, we learned how easily many corporations could leverage even a bear economy to increase shareholder profits while maintaining precarity conditions on the workers’ side. The jobs we’d heard of weren’t coming back—at least, not with anywhere near the security they’d once had, let alone with the same distribution of profit among employees.
So, you’d think we millennials would have learned our lesson then, right? But no. The problem with neoliberalism is that it can be found all across the mainstream political spectrum, so although people kept “voting for change”, there wasn’t actually much economic variety on offer. As such, rich-poor divide kept growing, and the regulatory frameworks ostensibly meant to keep money out of politics kept eroding.
Remember when the Panama Papers came out in 2016, and outlined the ludicrous number of tax havens used to keep money out of public circulation?
Remember how nothing changed in their wake?
And so, we had to learn our lesson yet again in 2020, when pandemic hit, and some people’s fortunes skyrocketed while lockdown and disease killed and devastated millions. That was a painful period for many reasons, not least of which being that we bore witness to how quickly governments could change, and could suddenly find the money to fund new initiatives… if they involved helping out corporations in a crisis.
But even though that series of events offered an astonishing reminder of how quickly our societies can change, what followed was a harsh lesson in the fact that they probably wouldn’t. When vaccines became a proprietary game in pandemic—when we saw headlines gamifying Pfizer and Moderna’s race to the top; when India saw tens if not hundreds of thousands of needless added deaths because of corporate, state-backed embargos on its ability to manufacture key vaccines on site—we knew. We knew that pandemic had both taught us how quickly change could come, and… therefore how much of a conscious, profit-driven decision it had always been, to not allow it to come any sooner.
And this healthcare atrocity, of course, was playing out alongside a huge uptick in climate change disasters, which study after study laid primarily at the feet of massive oil companies dedicated to doing as little as they could to mitigate their impact. What in blazes was left for individuals to do? How could we even begin to enact personal agency in a world where the real culprits of socioeconomic and ecological disaster, just like the culprits of pandemic disaster, were so maddeningly beyond reach?
Then Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year. 6.6 million people have been displaced so far, and we’ve seen untold numbers of heinous war crimes add to the equally devastating death tolls among Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. Just like that! Whole worlds forever laid to waste. Whole townships brought to ruin.
We also watched the world’s system of visas and refugee border crossings reveal itself for the arbitrary and xenophobic nightmare it’s always been.
And now we’re witnessing local economic deprivation through surging gas and food prices (not just from war, but war on top of distribution-system breakdown in pandemic) shape people’s moral judgments and general attitudes about the conflict.
Have we learned our lesson yet?
Do we finally have a lock on our own existential precarity?
Are we ready to give up the myth of control over our circumstances that has shaped so much of our approach to living better lives?
And—for a spot of optimism amid so bleak a fray—what other critical and political traditions might we lean into instead, once we’re ready to embrace how much agency we never really had, over the shape of our lives on whole?
S3. Translating Carrasquilla
The more things change, the more they stay the same—and translating an older novel really tends to sing that lesson home. One of my greatest challenges with La marquesa de Yolombó lies in the fact that, although the book is very good at highlighting the plight of women in its costumbrismo era (the 1700s in Spain’s local colony), it also perpetuates the deepest colorism, especially in its portrayal of Afro-colombian characters. In the above painting, which I found in the Casa Museo de Tomás Carrasquilla and which depicts a scene from the novel, the protagonist Bárbara, the “Beloved of her Negroes”, is seen with them in the gold-panning mines—but in a position of authority and superiority, cloaked in European finery while they’re half-clad and working in the dirt to serve her family’s business venture. In the book, it’s a mark of Bárbara’s exceptionalism that she’s so good to them, and so beloved by them.
As I mentioned in the introductory essay preceding Carrasquilla’s short stories, racialization is much more complex in those works set at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. There, blackness and brownness are fluid descriptors, describing affluent characters at times but also used in more stereotypically negative ways among the lower working classes. However, there’s far less nuance in his costumbrismo novels, where a wide range of non-white titles for local “mixed” peoples exists—as does a strong sense of elite whiteness that has nothing to do with English colonialism. And that’s… a tough nut to crack, while thinking about how to present this novel to an Anglo-Western readership in the 21st century.
What I really want to say is that colorism is widespread in non-Anglo contexts as well, and not because the Spaniards were chasing any other cultural peak but their own. I want to point to the very specific ethnic delineations that exist in Spanish cultures, that are all vaguely swept over in English, into two or three crude categories: “white”, “non-white”, and “mixed”. I also want to call attention to how Afro-Colombians endure full-on racism from people who in the West would be “latino”, and who’d identify while living there as marginalized BIPOC, because they’d be lumped into English notions of non-whiteness—but who in their own stories are white to the core.
And I want to say that Carrasquilla’s work is important to read for all these reasons—for the ugliness in parts of his prose, alongside the strong advocacy and wit and clever turns of phrase in others. I want to say that the representation of Spanish white supremacy in La marquesa de Yolombó can offer the Anglo-Western world an important rap on the knuckles, when it comes to thinking of anti-racist initiatives as just one more terrain in which we hold the center. We do not. Rather, projects of hegemony and supremacy abound—and it’s only when we’re willing to recognize the fuller scope of their impact on human thriving that we can even begin to tackle the root causes.
But is an English-language readership ready to give up the cultural power that comes with seeing its own racist history as the world’s most important? Can a North American readership adequately process another culture—a culture it sees as non-white—engaged in white supremacy of its own, too?
That’s the question, isn’t it? But as much as it remains a looming challenge, it’s also a challenge I look forward to taking up, in the eventual introduction to this work.
F3. Nope
A lot of folks are now comparing spectacle-film director Jordan Peele to M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village, Unbreakable), which I understand on one level. However, I also don’t think this alignment adequately describes the way that “twists” work in Peele’s films. I think Peele is doing something pretty special—and after watching his latest film, Nope, I’m keen to see where he takes his perspective next.
Shyamalan, of course, is a director (in)famous for his twists. But I’d also describe him as a director whose films always promise to drive home a clear causal connection between narrative elements, and who doesn’t care if that causality ends up seeming far-fetched or absurd. And why should he? Realism isn’t the promise he’s made with the audience. Rather, his aim is to deliver on the satisfaction of having everything come together: of the world proving to have a kind of harmony to it after all.
Does everything “come together” in a pat way in Peele’s films? Not exactly. Nope, for instance, is definitely in conversation with Stephen Spielberg’s style of big summer blockbuster: the ones where we meet the unknown, and learn something about ourselves and the unknown by the movie’s close. But this is an actual conversation with that sort of film—not like, say, JJ Abrams in Super 8: invoking nostalgia without more deeply interrogating the source material—and it doesn’t look for closure.
Rather, like Get Out and Us, Nope establishes its narrative playing field and then goes on to stymie the viewer who might want perfect analogies and definitive conclusions. That’s because Peele’s promise to the viewer is affective spectacle, more than causal relationships between a string of plot points; and on that sense of spectacle, he usually delivers. Nope in particular is a lot of fun to watch, and also filled with cultural references that suggest added layers to the film. But layers of what, exactly?
The film gives us many forms of a “bad miracle”: first, in an opening sequence that establishes a world where a chimpanzee once went wild on a TV sitcom set, killing its cast-mates; next, in a fluke accident that kills a father who’s been wrangling horses for film productions; third, in the son’s struggle to perform properly himself for an audience, while trying to fill his father’s shoes for a tense movie crew. And we haven’t even gotten to the main sci-fi event yet—which I won’t spoil, but which one hundred percent resonates with all these unexpected events come before.
At the core of this film lies a repudiation—oft-repeated, as the title of this film is uttered over and over by characters—of the classic horror idea of “looking up” at monstrosity, of bearing witness to being witnessed by something larger and more unfathomable than ourselves. There are plenty of other call-backs to mainstream cinema here, too—in character tropes, in plot points, and even in the small-set horror movie feel of the remote desert-valley farmstead where most of the action occurs. But one of the most important visuals is literally a giant green square associated with our sci-fi spectacle (again, no spoilers). After plenty of hints that this spectacle, and our characters’ interactions with it, have some connection to our own relationship as audiences with cinema, this giant green square becomes the ultimate allegorical tease:
“Oh, you think you know what this is about?” it almost says. “Nah, it’s about whatever you want to project onto it.”
And that’s very much in keeping with what Peele did in Us—and, to a lesser extent, in Get Out: he established a narrative playing field within well-travelled filmic tropes, and built storylines therein that can be read in many different ways, depending on what you decide to throw onto the “green screen” of each film’s imperfect allegory.
I don’t think I’ve seen a director use filmic tropes in this manner before. In Peele’s hands, the past is important, but not as something to be glorified, or longed for, or to feel necessarily good about “getting” when a reference clicks in a film today. Instead, it simply exists—in all its curious violence, a spectacle unto itself—and although we can’t help but move through environments shaped by it, we don’t have to agree to all its premises. We don’t have to strive to make everything about the past fit.
Sometimes we can just acknowledge its existence and… say “Nope.”
M3. A recipe: Blueberry-lime Bundt cake
I cooked quite a few fun things this month, but I was most pleasantly surprised by my blueberry-lime Bundt cake, which is pretty straightforward in some ways, but which also required a key modification that I’d like to discuss.
Now, it should be noted that I baked this cake on the fly, so I was limited in my choices by what I had on hand after the stores were closed. I baked this cake as part of a Canadian tradition of sending either coffee cake or casserole to someone mourning. A friend of mine had just lost their grandmother, after many years of gruelling dementia, and they were carrying a heavy load while supporting their grieving father. My plan was to send the cake out to them first thing the next day (and I did!), but that meant making do with the ingredients I had on hand, which included blueberries, limes, and yoghurt. It was also my first time trying out a new, silicon Bundt pan, and although the next cake that I made in it (a chocolate-espresso cake, for my feast day with friends) came out perfectly, this one was my “practice Bundt”.
But hey! I enjoy the slight failures, too, for what they teach about the process.
(Oh, and even though I’m not giving you the recipe for that other cake? Quick, emphatic reminder that if you’re making a dark cake in a Bundt pan, use cocoa powder, not flour, when prepping the mould for easy removal. The powder will absorb into the cake, instead of lingering in little white flecks that distract from the overall look.
You’ll note in the photo above, for instance, that there’s still a difference in coloration from the cocoa, but that’s because I only had access to a lighter variant. Do you have dark cocoa powder in your grocery store? Go for it, and make magic!)
Okay, now for the lessons I learned from Cake #1.
M L Clark’s Blueberry Lime Bundt Cake
The key to this recipe is twofold: First, everything needs to be at room temperature. That’s because, second, the recipe involves blending a lot of eggs together with the butter, Greek yoghurt (or sour cream; other dairies will work, but without the same tang), and sugar mixture before the flour. To get the right consistency in the “wets” before you add the “dries”, you don’t want anything clinging to its refrigerator chill.
You’ll also note that there’s no vanilla. Gasp! A white or yellow cake without vanilla? Well, you’re more than welcome to add vanilla, but the lime is such a delicate note in this recipe that I didn’t want anything else overpowering it. Conversely, though, if you don’t have (or want) limes, you’re more than welcome to make this same basic recipe with vanilla in the icing and the batter instead. I’m sure it’ll still be wonderful.
Ingredients
The Wets
225 grams (1 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
170 grams (2/3 cups) Greek yoghurt or sour cream, at room temperature
3/4 to 1 cup stevia (I’m conservative with my sugars, but 1 cup binds a bit better)
Zest from one medium lime
4 large eggs + 1 extra yolk, at room temperature
The Dries
300 grams (2 1/3 cups) flour, plus more for dusting the Bundt pan
2 tsp baking soda (Remember: when there’s an acid in the recipe, like the blueberries and yoghurt here, this alkaline salt compound creates CO2, which helps with the rise; when there’s no strong acid, you want baking powder instead. But when working with baking soda, the “dries” have to be added as near to the bake as possible, because the moment the baking soda mixes with the acids, the reaction begins, and you don’t want to lose its benefits!)
1/4 tsp salt
The Joy
2 1/2 cups blueberries, at room temperature and dry
The Icing
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
Juice from at least one fresh lime (you’ll be eyeballing consistency, so this isn’t rigid)
Method
Preheat the oven to 350 F (176 C) and butter and flour your Bundt pan well.
Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl and set aside. Mix the sugar and lime zest (in a food processor, if you have it, but by hand is fine—just cut the zest as fine as you can first) and set aside in another bowl.
Beat the butter and yoghurt together until smooth. Add in the sugar mixture and beat until fluffy and light.
Introduce the eggs one at a time, mixing well and making sure all parts are integrated. (You can’t overmix this part, but the moment you add the flour mixture, you’re on borrowed time to get it in the oven. You don’t want to be scraping down forgotten sides later!)
When the oven is ready, add the flour mixture, stirring only as much as needed for it to be just fully blended. Then fold in the blueberries, and pour the mixture into your Bundt pan. If it’s silicon, run a knife through the center of the batter to eliminate air pockets. If it’s metal, a quick tap on the counter will do.
Now the tough part. The base recipe I used claimed 50 minutes as a cook time, but I live in a high altitude city. It took me 90 minutes to be able to prick the cake mixture to its center and have the skewer come out clean. I recommend checking on your cake every ten minutes after 55, and see what works best for you. (And remember: if you stab a blueberry, it will of course come out wet!)
Let the Bundt pan rest for ten minutes before inverting it onto a rack or tray, to cool the cake fully.
In a small bowl, whisk the confectioners’ sugar and lime juice together until smooth. It should be just thin enough to pour, so start with a little lime juice and introduce more as needed. Drizzle the glaze over the top and sides of the cooled cake, and allow to set fully before serving.
Baking at high altitudes is a lot of fun, though, because there’s just so much in generic recipes online that require a little tinkering. I know, for instance, that some changes to standard ingredient ratios (e.g., for the flour, baking soda, and baking powder) also help with the rise in slightly lower-pressure air systems. And so although this cake took a lot longer than expected to bake? And was perfectly functional and tasty at the end (at least, so I’m told by the recipient)? The whole experience also reminded me that I need to do a lot more exploring of recipe modifications to account for the climate in which I bake. Gosh, thank goodness I don’t only bake when people die!
I3. Pakistan, and disaster recovery
This past month, as part of the news briefs I now do twice-weekly at OnlySky, I covered Pakistan’s agonizing monsoon season, which has seen about a third of the country flooded, and devastating numbers of citizens displaced, killed, stranded, or stripped of their livelihood through damage to their land and loss of livestock.
But what I want to call attention to in this newsletter is what made me select this news item in the first place—because I don’t cover everything, obviously. I cover, rather, what I can talk about in the most humanist way possible. And here, what tweaked me, when following mainstream Western coverage of this humanitarian disaster, was how often it was treated as a freak natural phenomenon—certainly tethered to climate change, but with no other critical factors to consider.
As I noted in my news brief (which, being tiny, could hardly get into all the nuances of the issue), Pakistan’s crisis was not just a matter of climate change, but also of our failure as a series of cultures and societies to adapt to climate change. After all, Pakistan had another devastating flood year in 2010—and in its wake, not enough changed, even though it was the focus of a great deal of academic and socio-scientific analysis. Immediate emergency aid showed up, for sure! But soon it was back to business as usual, with the global community neglecting to invest as effectively in preventative measures as it should have at that point.
And in the past 12 years? Well, Pakistan has only seen more impoverished populations eking out what livings and lives they could on the most precarious and at-risk of flood zones, with human habitation and industry-driven resource-guarding measures exacerbating the problem by disrupting natural waterways that would otherwise have helped to alleviate the flood conditions we’re seeing this year.
As word is now starting to circulate of Pakistan asking for international reparations for climate change crises caused by the global north (but disproportionately affecting the global south), we’d do well to take the appeal seriously. Yes, local government coulda shoulda done more—but with what funding? It’s international business communities, along with major nation-state economies, that actually have the means to redirect investment within Pakistan’s borders. This global responsibility wasn’t taken seriously enough in 2010, but with any luck—and a lot more humanist sensitivity—maybe this will be the flood year that helps world organizations recognize the singular importance of preventative measures, to mitigate the inevitability of more devastating humanitarian nightmares in the brutal environmental years ahead.
P3. This Is Hell!, with Chuck Mertz
To keep my podcast triptych this month “fair and balanced”, I suppose I should start with a complaint about This Is Hell!, too—but really, it’s less of a complaint and more of a reminder that podcasts have a living history in another form of audio content. This Is Hell! is a live radio broadcast (out of Chicago, on WNUR every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Central Time) then published online—and this means that its chewy, thoughtful, longform interviews with all manner of activist, academic, analyst, and community organizer on strongly leftist themes is surrounded by plenty of airtime-filling chatter of varying relevance and quality.
In the episode I’ll focus on here, for instance, we’re given a splendid interview with Susan Paulson, a Latin-Americanist who works with low-impact South American communities and advocates for degrowth—but the interview itself, in “Strategic Degrowth”, only starts at the 17-minute mark.
It’s a wonderful conversation, though—as most of them are, because Chuck Mertz is one of the most nuanced interviewers I’ve ever encountered. His questions are sharp, complex, and carefully constructed. By and large, too, his guests are more than up to the challenge of answering such intricate and thoughtful queries on the spot. What therefore emerges is an extremely philosophical analysis of each expert’s theory and praxis, whether they work on the frontlines of an active real-world combat, or have just written a book about a key aspect of public policy, or are on the ground addressing the fallout of failed government policies for marginalized human beings.
Paulson’s work with degrowth is both theory and praxis, inasmuch as she’s known for some excellent academic introductions to degrowth that decenter the West, but also contributes to the work of building better movements for change. One of her most salient remarks in this interview, for instance, comes from a segment reflecting on how degrowth fits into a broader spectrum of activism. There, she cautions against making degrowth a totalizing movement, by observing that related activism is
actually [about] being often quite painfully aware that every collaboration involves power differences, and that if we want to listen to each other across differences and find common ground to move toward mutually satisfying futures, we need to be brave enough to name those differences. … People in degrowth have been very concerned about the dangers of aligning with politicians or movement[s] that might co-opt degrowth. Many of the 60s and 70s radical environmental impulses and ideas got sort of co-opted by sustainable development, that put it all into a new way of propping up capitalist growth and inequality. … But I also push my degrowth colleagues to be aware of co-opting others into our mission. That’s why I write, you know, degrowth’s not going to be the umbrella of every other movement, right? We’re not going to be the caretaker of decolonial feminisms and queer ecologies and all these other people. Rather, think across differences—not as equals, but recognizing we’re unequally powered in position: how can we make agreements? We can learn from each other—and maybe disagree, but learn from each other, across these differences.
What I love about this sort of collaborative thinking is that it refuses a stark, linear approach to our most important conversations. Although drawing from past experts, and otherwise being in conversation with prior movements, can prove important and insightful to us as theorists and activists, we have to remember that we can (and should) also be leaning on the collective wisdom that exists in the here and now.
Degrowth itself is a concept that refuses linearity, and argues that both constant and exponential economic growth are not the best measures of a healthy society. Instead of a single market metric going up, up, up to demonstrate the robustness of a given state, what other relationships might we build amongst ourselves? What other ways of valuing connectivity might better allow us to live in harmony with the world? If we scale down our fixation on material luxury, what greater equities can we see take root?
This Is Hell! always sets huge sociopolitical challenges upon its listeners—and it doesn’t necessarily concern itself with solving any of them, either. Rather, its interviews invite you to choose to be better informed of all the urgent political, eco-economic, and cultural conversations operating concurrently in this wild and wonderfully messy world of ours. Which of these myriad possible discourses and activisms you’ll lean into is up to you.
But we certainly don’t lack for options.