To follow up on an earlier post, here’s an excerpt from Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir of her intimate relationship with the photographer Robert Mappelthorpe in 1960s New York.

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

From Chapter 1

Monday’s Children

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.

The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.

The swan became one with the sky. I struggled to find words to describe my own sense of it. Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds.

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Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

By James Hoggan

Lemmings and Lifeguards: Keeping Humankind from Crashing on the Rocks

We are standing at the edge of a cliff. Behind us is a considerable crowd, 6.7 billion people and counting, and below is a beckoning pool. Some people say that you can jump into that pool without risk. They say that humans have been doing so for ages without any problems. But others say that waves have been eating away at the foot of the cliff, causing big rocks to fall into the water. They say that the risk of jumping grows more frightening by the day. Whom do you trust?

That’s a tricky question because here, on the climate change cliff, some of the lifeguards are just not that qualified, some have forgotten entirely whose interests they are supposed to protect, and some seem quite willing to sacrifice the odd swimmer (or the whole swim team) if they think there is a good profit to be made in the process. That’s what this book is about: lousy lifeguards—people whose lack of training, conflicts of interest, or general disregard have put us all at risk of storming off the cliff like so many apocryphal lemmings.

I’m not saying that all of the lousy lifeguards are evil or ill-intentioned, although some may shake your faith in humanity. Rather, the whole lifeguarding institution seems to be failing, and not necessarily by accident. In the past two decades, and particularly on the issue of climate change, there has been an attack on public trust and a corresponding collapse in the integrity of the public conversation. The great institutions of science and government seem to have lost their credibility, and the watchdogs in media have lost their focus. Here we are, standing on the most dangerous environmental precipice that the human race has ever encountered, and we suddenly have to take a fresh and frightening look at the lifeguards in our midst.

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It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street

By Nomi Prins

The Second Great Bank Depression has spawned so many lies, it’s hard to keep track of which is the biggest. Possibly the most irksome class of lies, usually spouted by Wall Street hacks and conservative pundits, is that we’re all victims to a bunch of poor people who bought McMansions, or at least homes they had no business living in. If that was really what this crisis was all about, we could have solved it much more cheaply in a couple of days in late 2008, by simply providing borrowers with additional capital to reduce their loan principals. It would have cost about 3 percent of what the entire bailout wound up costing, with comparatively similar risk.

Just as great oaks from little acorns grow, so, too, can a Second Great Bank Depression from a tiny loan grow. But so you know, it wasn’t the tiny loan’s fault. It was everyone and everything that piled on top. That’s how a small loan in Stockton, California, can be linked to a worldwide economic collapse all the way to Iceland, through a plethora of shady financial techniques and overzealous sales pitches.

Here are some numbers for you. There were approximately $1.4 trillion worth of subprime loans outstanding in the United States by the end of 2007. By May 2009, there were foreclosure filings against approximately 5.1 million properties. If it was only the subprime market’s fault, 1.4 trillion would have covered the entire problem, right? Read More

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

By Michelle Alexander

From the Introduction

Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Cotton’s story illustrates, in many respects, the old adage “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals—goals shared by the Founding Fathers. Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. Hundreds of years later, America is still not an egalitarian democracy. The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history. They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

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Jackson Lears is one of the finest cultural historians working in the United States today, and with Rebirth of a Nation he has written what might be the best history yet of the period between the Civil War and World War I, a transformative half-century that built inexorably toward the emergence of modern America. So we’re thrilled that it’s one of our January selections.

Rebirth of a Nation is a rich chronicle of that momentous period when America reunited and began to form the world power of the twentieth century. His teeming cast includes imperialists, Gilded Age mavericks, and vaudeville entertainers, and he illuminates the roles played in the nation’s evolution by a variety of seekers, male and female, from populist farmers to avant-garde artists and writers to progressive reformers; whatever their motivations, all were swept up in longings for revitalization.

In the excerpt below, Lears describes the spiritual exhaustion that even in the 1870s sapped the will of a nation still reeling from the moral horrors of the Civil War, a torpor that would eventually give rise to widespread yearnings for renewal and rebirth and, in time, a new surge of national vitality.

(Click here to learn more about Rebirth of a Nation.)

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

By Jackson Lears

From Chapter 1

The Long Shadow of Appomattox

Wars have a way of staying in the mind. Scenes of unimaginable carnage cannot be casually shrugged off; visceral fears and rages cannot be easily forgotten. So it was in the United States after the Civil War ended at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in 1865. For the victors as well as the vanquished, the fight left many wounds festering. Sectional bitterness flourished for years after grass covered the corpses. Widespread popular weariness failed to dry up the wells of resentment, in the North as in the South.

There were good reasons for this. The Civil War was not only the most destructive war in U.S. history but the most morally and emotionally charged, as well—a total war in every sense. As hostilities intensified, both armies soon abandoned the West Point Code, which was rooted in just war tradition. The code’s key principle was proportionality: commanders were expected to keep their own and their enemy’s casualties to a minimum consistent with limited battlefield objectives, and to avoid inflicting any damage on the civilian population.

The principle of proportionality was an early casualty of the war. Within a year after the firing on Fort Sumter, both sides had targeted civilians and sustained losses in the field that would previously have been unimaginable. Yet popular opinion, North and South, submitted to the slaughter. Both armies were cheered on by ideologues who were convinced of the sanctity of their cause and the impossibility of compromise. Only a handful of observers—most prominently, Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address—saw the tragic complexity of the conflict. Most commentators preferred the simplicities of nationalist melodrama. Romantic notions of nationhood flourished in pulpits and the press. Preachers and editors invoked visions of blood sacrifice, endowing mass death with an aura of the sacred. For many Christians, the wartime atmosphere became charged with millennial expectancy, with the hope that the creation of a righteous nation would somehow coincide with the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. Such extravagant visions sustained strategies of total war. Gradually it became apparent that the North was far better equipped than the South to pile up corpses without counting the cost, and to reduce an entire region to a wasteland. Read More

A Happy New Year to our readers!

In keeping with the new year spirit of renewal, our PBC Pick for January is Rediscovering Values by Jim Wallis. Wallis, one of the nation’s foremost religious thinkers and activists and a tireless champion of social justice, sees in the financial and economic crisis of the past few years an opportunity to look afresh at our values and reconsider what’s truly meaningful in our lives. The question “When will the crisis be over?” is an important one, he writes, but a deeper, and in the long run more important, question is “How will this crisis change us?” Read the excerpt below to find out what he means.

Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street

By Jim Wallis

Introduction

Asking the Wrong Questions

The 2008-2009 economic crisis presents us with an enormous opportunity: to rediscover our values — as people, as families, as communities of faith, and as a nation. It is a moment of decision we dare not pass by. We have forgotten some very important things, and it’s time to remember them again. Yes, we do need an economic recovery, but we also need a moral recovery — on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street. And we will need a moral compass for the new economy that is emerging. That’s what this book is all about.

The Great Recession that has gripped the world, defined the moment, and captured all of our attention has also revealed a profound values crisis. Just beneath the surface of the economic debate, a deep national reflection is begging to take place and, indeed, has already begun in people’s heads, hearts, and conversations. The questions it raises are about our personal, family, and national priorities; about our habits of the heart, about our measures of success, about the values of our families and our children, about our spiritual well-being, and about the ultimate goals and purposes of life — including our economic life.

Underneath the public discourse, another conversation is emerging about who and what we want to be — as individuals, as a nation, and as a human community. By and large, the media has missed the deeper discussion and continues to focus only upon the surface of the crisis. And most of our politicians just want to tell us how soon the crisis could be over. But there are deeper questions here and some fundamental choices to make. That’s why this could be a transformational moment, one of those times that comes around only very occasionally. We don’t want to miss this opportunity.

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Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal

By Moshe Adler

Introduction

Professors of introductory economics are fond of telling their students about the eternal quest for a one-handed economist who would not be able to say, “On the other hand . . .” Is the recession about to end? Economists always waffle on this and similar questions; such predictions can, of course, get them into trouble. But whenever it is necessary to choose sides between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the powerless, or between workers and corporations, economists are all too often of one mind: according to conventional economic theory, what’s good for the rich and the powerful is good for “the economy.”

Why is economic theory so one-sided? Is it because anyone who devotes her life to investigating how the economy works inevitably reaches the conclusion that what’s good for bosses is good for everybody? Not at all. For every critical economic issue there are competing concepts and theories that lead to different conclusions. The problem is that when they are not missing from textbooks altogether, these theories are almost always summarily dismissed. This would have been of no consequence if the only victims were economics students, but unfortunately most citizens are familiar only with textbook economics, and the economists who influence government policies are, by and large, textbook economists. (Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz was an exception, but his term as senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank lasted only three years, from 1997 to 2000).

Economics for the Rest of Us examines the two cornerstones of economics: Part 1 covers economic efficiency and Part 2 covers how wages are determined. The definition of economic efficiency used by economists is covered in the first part of the book because all of economics is centered around it. When economists claim that “the free market is efficient,” regardless of how skewed its distribution of resources—or of how much suffering it produces—and when they oppose government intervention to decrease inequality and reduce suffering, it is their definition of efficiency that they rely on. If this were the only valid definition of economic efficiency, economists would perhaps be justified in using it. But, in fact, economists have a choice. An earlier definition of economic efficiency was sensitive to the distribution of income, and this earlier definition suggests that to increase efficiency the government should redistribute resources from the rich to the poor. The definition that economists adopted instead was developed as an attempt to discredit the earlier definition. As we shall see, however, it is not clear that the redistribution version can be discredited so easily. Read More

Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America

By Rich Benjamin

What exactly is a Whitopia? A Whitopia (pronounced why-toh-pee-uh) is whiter than the nation, its respective region, and its state. It has posted at least 6 percent population growth since 2000. The majority of that growth (often upward of 90 percent) is from white migrants. And a Whitopia has a je ne sais quoi—an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.

Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a prestigious nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., has been documenting white population loss from ethnically diverse “melting pot suburbs” for decades. And that loss is significant. During the 1990s, the suburbs of greater Los Angeles lost 381,000 whites, and other California suburbs, such as Oakland and Riverside-San Bernardino, and also the Bergen-Passaic suburbs in New Jersey, lost more than 70,000 whites each. The rate of white population loss from the melting pot suburbs of Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and several other major suburban areas exceeded the rate of out-migration from their central cities.

“The Ozzies and Harriets of the 1990s are bypassing the suburbs or big cities in favor of more livable, homogenous small towns and rural areas,” Frey presciently forecast in 1994, when this phenomenon was nowhere near its maturity. Read More

Let the Great World Spin

By Colum McCann

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke—stand around and point upwards, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upwards at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary. Read More

What could the presidential election of 1912 possibly have in common with the 2008 campaign? Plenty, as it turns out. In the earlier contest the Progressive Party, led by former President Theodore Roosevelt, pursued a program of economic, social, and political reform–including direct democracy, social justice, and a balance between rights and civic duty–that provoked a broad and passionate debate about the future of the country. In Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy, acclaimed political historian Sidney M. Milkis revisits this emotionally charged contest to show how the Progressive program of social reform and “direct democracy” has reverberated through American politics—especially in 2008, when Barack Obama took up a kindred standard. Here is an excerpt:

Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy

By Sidney M. Milkis

From Chapter 1

The 1912 election was one of the great campaigns in American history. It was the decisive battle of the Progressive era, which witnessed the first comprehensive efforts to come to terms with the fundamental conflicts raised by the industrial revolution. The technological breakthroughs and the frenzied search for new markets and new sources of capital that were associated with rapid industrialization caused unprecedented economic growth. But dynamic growth also generated a wide range of problems that seriously challenged the capacity of the American political system, dominated by highly decentralized party organizations, to respond. Above all, the presidential contenders of 1912 had to grapple with the troubling question of how to curb the excesses of big business—the giant “trusts” that, according to reformers, constituted uncontrolled and irresponsible bastions of power. These combinations of wealth aroused widespread fears that growing corporate influence might jeopardize the equal opportunity of individuals to climb the economic ladder. Reformers excoriated the economic conditions of this period—dubbed the “Gilded Age”—as excessively opulent and holding little promise for industrial workers and small farmers. Moreover, many believed that great business interests had captured and corrupted the men and methods of government for their own profit. Party leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—were seen as irresponsible “bosses” who did the bidding of “special interests.”

Taking place at a defining juncture of American history, the 1912 campaign, as one historian has written, was a “remarkable moment,” the rare presidential contest that “verged on political philosophy.” The election showcased four impressive candidates who engaged in a remarkable debate about the future of American politics: William Howard Taft, the incumbent Republican president; Woodrow Wilson, the distinguished scholar of American politics, who had been elected governor of New Jersey just two years before; Eugene Debs, the popular labor leader of Indiana who ran on the Socialist Party ticket; and Theodore Roosevelt, the irrepressible former president, who bolted from the GOP and ran as the champion of the Progressive Party. All four candidates recognized that fundamental changes were occurring in the American political landscape, and each attempted to define the Progressive era’s “answer to the questions raised by the new industrial order that had grown up within the American constitutional system.”

That the 1912 election registered, and inspired, fundamental changes in American politics suggests the historical significance of the Progressive Party. Although Wilson was elected president, the Progressives were the driving force of the election. Indeed, with the exception of the Republican Party of the 1850s, the Progressive Party remains the most important third party to appear on the American political landscape. With the celebrated former President Roosevelt as its candidate, the Bull Moose Party won 27.4 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes from six states. It also elected 13 new members of Congress and 230 state legislators. This was an extraordinary feat. In fact, no third-party candidate for the presidency—before or after 1912—has received so large a percentage of the popular vote or as many electoral votes. More important, as a party that embraced and helped legitimize new social movements and candidate-centered campaigns, the Progressive Party pioneered a plebiscitary form of governance that evolved over the course of the twentieth century and appears to have come into its own in recent elections. Read More