Citizen Reader

Time 2021-09-01 12:34:02

Web Name: Citizen Reader

WebSite: http://www.citizenreader.com

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Over the last few weeks I spent some quality time reading Alex MacGillis s new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. It is about Amazon, but more broadly, it is about how Amazon is ruining many aspects of American life. It is a super-depressing read. I absolutely adore journalism, history, and sociology books that help me see what I call the big picture --how specific actions, policies, and habits contribute to large-scale cultures and situations. To me the gold standard of this kind of writing is Brian Alexander--whose investigative books Glass House and The Hospital showed me how capitalism and health care, respectively, both suck in America. If you didn t want to call these books big picture books, I suppose you could call them journalistic accounts that help you view the macro through the lens of the micro, but I would never say that because I hate the phrase through the lens of... I got about 75 pages into MacGillis s book, when he was talking about how Amazon the company and Bezos the head of Amazon impact housing costs, manufacturing, and even the massive amounts of money to be found among the upper-class in Washington, D.C. The book at that point was so big picture that it was actually a little hard for me to follow, but I stuck with it, and I m glad I did, because it is really a comprehensive and well-researched book.It s gross. Amazon is gross from start to finish, and so is Jeff Bezos. I can t even pull out a representative quote for you because all of the book s stories rest on other stories and numbers and research and it all kind of has to be absorbed together to be believed. But trust me: the lengths to which this company will go to sell you absolutely everything--at a fairish price now but most likely at a nightmare-ish price later--are astounding. Forget about all of us citizens being fucked at both the national and state levels of politics, where money rules. Amazon reaches right down into local governments and seeks to remove all of your rights at the level of where you live.So here are my suggestions:Read the book (of course). It s a challenge but stick with it.Stop shopping at Amazon. If you can t stop cold turkey, at least delete your Prime membership or don t sign up for one. More than anything, Jeff Bezos wants you to sign up for Amazon Prime. Don t do it. I m begging you.I have been trying to avoid shopping on Amazon this summer and year and I have mostly been successful. Sometimes you are going to pay more and wait a bit longer for merchandise, but you can do it. Sometimes you might actually find things elsewhere a little cheaper or nearer by you. Here s a little story to get you started:The eldest CRjr needed a watch because we are trying to let him take baby steps to independence and walk with a friend to a nearby park. To do that, I had to be able to tell him a time when I needed him back, and he needed to be able to know the time, so, presto, he needed a watch. We looked at some on Amazon for $23, but I am now completely just sickened whenever I hear the word Amazon so I told him we d go look at a local hardware store that has a time center/watch shop in it. And we found a watch that actually fits him better (the face is smaller) for $30. The guy was super nice and set the time and date for us, and the younger CRjr of course also then wanted a watch, but they didn t have any similar ones for a similar price (there was a fifty-dollar one but I am not strapping a fifty-dollar watch on a grade-schooler). So then we came home and found a very similar watch on Timex.com.Results? We spent a little bit more, but we got better watches and better-fitting watches (I think the $23 ones we were looking at on Amazon were Amazon knock-off brands of their branded better sellers, something Amazon does a lot to get you coming and going). We had a fun outing. Me and the CRjrs had a nice chat on the way out about how it was nice to spend $30 in our town, in a store where local people were working.It felt good. It won t save the world but it s 23 more dollars that will not be added to Jeff Bezos s billions. It seems like just yesterday I was posting about July 30 as National Whistleblower Day, and here we are again.Happy National Whistleblower Day!I wish I could report better news on the let s be more humane as a society to the people who tell us about all the illegal and immoral secret shit going on front, but I don t. Whistleblower Daniel Hale, who revealed information to The Intercept about how America s precise drone warfare strikes were not really so precise and killed a lot of innocent people, was sentenced to prison for 45 months this past Tuesday for doing so. The Biden administration was asking that he be sent to prison for nine years, so I guess 45 months in prison is to be considered good news. It s still wrong.It feels like I am reading all the time, and yet I don t have much to report here. For one thing a good chunk of my reading has been about how to implement a plant-based diet, as Mr. CR has developed more heart disease symptoms and I m interested in keeping Mr. CR as healthy as possible for as long as possible, because I like him a lot. The other day we were chatting a bit about people who love to carry guns, and I said, Why would you need to walk around with 80 pistols? (because I like to exaggerate but also because it seems like some people want to walk around with a lot of guns) and Mr. CR answered, Well, what would you do, Miss Smarty Pants, if the first 79 you were wearing didn t work?That s Mr. CR s sense of humor, and you can see why it s important to keep him on the planet.In other reading news I am re-reading Adrian Nicole LeBlanc s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which knocked me over the first time I read it and is knocking me over again. Also, I started George Orwell s 1984, because I never read it. Have you? Has anyone? It s interesting.I m also trying to write a lot more. And got this published at The Progressive, in honor of July 30: Shining a Light on the Tales of Whistleblowers. It s a review of director Sonia Kennebeck s trilogy of fascinating documentaries: National Bird, Enemies of the State, and United States vs. Reality Winner. They are excellent films and nobody shows you how tricky (and important) it can be to ask questions and try to figure out the truth better than Sonia Kennebeck does.So how is your summer going? Whatcha reading? Remember when The Hunger Games trilogy was big?Yeah, me neither. The first book in the series came out back in 2008 and it was right about then that I was busy having an awful surgery, trying to create a freelance career, and eventually having my first little CRjr. I was aware of Suzanne Collins s three popular YA books (Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) but I didn t pay much attention. I think I read the first one, was underwhelmed, and never finished the series.So why all of a sudden I had the urge to watch the movies that were made from the book, I couldn t tell you.I used to love movies (as only a person who started college as a film major can) and still do most of my thinking in mental movie memes. (Here s an example: Patrick Swayze as bar bouncer Dalton in the 1989 cult classic Road House: Be nice. Be nice until it s time to not be nice. I think this a lot, because people annoy me a lot, and I have to remind myself to be nice until it s time to not be nice, which mainly for me means giving myself permission to simply leave any situation where people are annoying me. I m no Patrick Swayze.) Eventually TV (my first crush), particularly British TV, supplanted movies in my heart, so for years I have watched only TV series when I ve had the time to watch anything at all, what with the copious amounts of time I spend reading and also trying and failing to make my own living. But lately I have been in the mood for movies. So I thought, well, what do I want to see? And for some reason I pulled The Hunger Games trilogy (although they made the three books into four movies) out of thin air.The movies are awful. No kidding. Simplistic in story, bare-bones in character development and dialogue, hard to see as most of the plot seemed to be set in the dark, no chemistry between the lead actors (and, I ask you, how do you throw together beautiful people like Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth and STILL have no chemistry?), glacial pace. Mr. CR is not generally a man who needs his movies (or his anything, frankly) to be quickly paced, and even he kept saying, Are these movies hundreds of hours long or does it just feel like they are? And yet, I kept watching them. And I kept watching for one reason:Peeta Mellark.If you don t know the story, I ll try to nutshell it without giving away any spoilers, although I suppose this series is so old that anyone who cares has already seen it/read it/knows the ending. In a futuristic America known as Panem, the country is controlled by the President in the affluent Capitol, while the rest of Panem is split into 12 districts that basically provide what the Capitol and its citizens require (and suffer greatly to do so). Each year, two tributes are chosen from each district--one male and one female--and all twenty-four tributes play against each other in the Hunger Games, until one victor kills the other 23 and is rewarded with getting to remain alive. The main characters are Katniss Everdeen, a sixteen-year-old from District 12, who volunteers to fight in the place of her sister Primrose, who was actually selected for the 74th annual Hunger Games. Another of Katniss s close friends, Gale, a slightly older boy, is also in the running, but escapes when Peeta Mellark is chosen.Then Katniss and Peeta are taken to the Capitol, where they fight in the Hunger Games, and manage to change the narrative of what happens there. In the subsequent books, the 12 districts start to rebel against the Capitol, and Katniss, Gale, and Peeta all have their separate roles to play in that story.Classic dystopia stuff, and classic love triangle, as Katniss eventually finds she has feelings for both Peeta and Gale. But here s where the narrative takes a slight turn. Gale, a friend of Katniss s who hunts and gathers food with her, is a stereotypical strong, good-looking Alpha Male (with his softer side; he does pledge to protect Katniss s family while she is gone and if she is killed), while Peeta is presented as somewhat of a non-entity whose main characteristic is that he has noticed Katniss since they were both young, and has grown to love her.So, anyway, the movies were so bad that I just went to the library and got the three books and plowed through those. And here s what I learned about these characters:I m in love with Peeta Mellark.Peeta doesn t exist just to be in love with Katniss (although sometimes the movies seem to present it that way). He s good with words and he s clearly very clever, coming up with his own wily (and non-violent) plans to keep himself and Katniss alive. He s understanding of Katniss s independence, and even though it s easy for him to be committed to their doomed lovers narrative, because he actually does love her, he is ready to step aside in case she chooses Gale and--get this--he is prepared to remain friends with her if that s what she prefers. He does everything he can to stay alive and win the games, while also going out of his way to NOT kill other tributes; he bakes; he holds Katniss to help her through her nightmares when she asks.Everything I read about today s dating scene at Medium (I really have to stop reading dating/relationship articles on Medium, which is big among millennials and tech bros) indicates there are not many Peetas in today s world.So here I am, going through my old-lady life of raising kids and cooking meals and freelancing, and all the while I do it I m thinking over the Hunger Games and Peeta Mellark.Even a few years ago I don t think I would have given Peeta Mellark this much thought. But the more I read about men and women interacting with one another, and the more I see and hear out in the world, the more I think we really need to encourage men in particular to explore new ways of being. And that s why I m so grateful for Peeta Mellark as a character. Now on to the real question. Get your librarian/reader thinking caps on and tell me: Any other series, YA or otherwise, featuring male characters who are sensitive, intelligent, kind, and still end up succeeding/surviving/winning in their own way? Let s face it. Those are the kinds of books I want to give the CRjrs. Subliminal programming at its best: Don t be a bro, kids. Be a Peeta. (Or, as Lil Taylor s Corey character in Say Anything said to John Cusack s Lloyd Dobler, No. Don t be a guy. The world is full of guys. Be a man. See? Movie memes, all day long.) Mr. CR frequently tells me that periodically I should, perhaps, just maybe, consider reading nonfiction or fiction that isn t as depressing as hell. It s a fair point, and I want to work with Mr. CR, but the only book on my shelf I want to read right now is titled Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Evidently it s about rising death rates among middle-aged (mostly male) individuals who don t hold college degrees, and what about our current American system might be encouraging those rising rates. Or, as the authors say: Along the way, we had discovered that suicide rates among middle-aged white Americans were rising rapidly. We found something else that puzzled us. Middle-aged white Americans were hurting in other ways. They were reporting more pain and poorer overall health, not as much as older Americans--health worse with age, after all--but the gap was closing. Health among the elderly was improving while health among the middle-aged was worsening...To our surprise, accidental poisonings were a big part of the story. How could this be? Were people somehow accidentally drinking Drano or weed killer? In our (then) innocence, we did not know that accidental poisonings was the category that contained drug overdoses, or that there was an epidemic of deaths from opioids, already well established and still rapidly spreading. Deaths from alcoholic liver disease were rising rapidly too, so that the fastest-rising death rates were from three causes: suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease...We came to call them deaths of despair, mostly as a convenient label for the three causes taken together. (pp. 1-2.)So there s that. And when that s too depressing I have, on deck, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which I will actually be re-reading because it blew my mind the first time: Jessica was good at attracting boys, but less good at holding on to them. She fell in love hard and fast. She desperately wanted to be somebody s real girlfriend, but she always ended up the other girl, the mistress, the one they saw on the down-low, the girl nobody claimed. Boys called up to her window after they d dropped off their main girls, the steady ones they referred to as wives. Jessica still had her fun, but her fun was somebody else s trouble, and for a wild girl at the dangerous age, the trouble could get big. (p. 3.)Ahhhh. Summer beach reading, the Citizen Reader way. What s on your TBR pile for the summer? Happy Memorial Day.Now please go watch the 2016 documentary National Bird, about America s policy of drone warfare.Today I am supporting our military personnel by asking that the United States change its drone warfare policy of dropping bombs on people who are maybe the target (and maybe not). As you will learn from National Bird, this policy is causing not only misery to many innocent citizens worldwide, it is also causing a lot of PTSD in our own soldiers.Thank you. Who wants to start their week by reading about a travesty of justice?Of course you ve come to the right place.I really want you to read this whole post, so I m going to keep this whistleblower story as short and as simple as possible (which whistleblower stories never are).Right now there is a man named Daniel Hale sitting in jail.If you follow national news at all, do you recall hearing about America s policy of pursuing drone warfare? That is, the art of using drones to drop bombs on suspected (mostly war on terror type) enemy targets? If not, much of the history of this policy, which began under George W. Bush and has continued, can be explained in relatively short order in the series of articles known as The Drone Papers, published by The Intercept. Basically, military and intelligence personnel watch targets of interest by using drones, decide that they are the targets America s commander in chief has decided need to be executed, and then drop bombs on them (again by drone) to execute them.There are some problems with this system. The data can be faulty and the wrong person can be killed. It can lead to death by stereotype; basically, in areas like Afghanistan, any military-age male is considered an enemy target. A lot of civilians get killed just because they re in the wrong place at the wrong time.*How do we know this? At least in part to whistleblower Daniel Hale, who was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013, and then worked as a contractor in the intelligence industry. He knew this was happening, and he revealed some classified information to the Intercept. For this, he has now been charged with multiple counts against the 1917 Espionage Act. Each count against Hale carries the threat of serious jail time. On the advice of his public defender lawyers, Hale recently pleaded guilty to one count and is awaiting sentencing this July. During the past few weeks, Hale was already arrested and jailed, supposedly to keep him from being a danger to himself. He has been put in solitary confinement in a Virginia jail and is there now.This story makes me so furious with the unfairness of it all that I just don t know where to turn. Whistleblowers are going to jail to tell the American public information they need to know--regardless of who I vote for, I am complicit in our country s (racist?) war machine. It is not fair that people just walking around in other countries, living their lives, were killed or lost limbs because they were in the wrong place, near someone WE (yes we; it s being done in my name as an American) decided needed to be executed. So then someone came forward to inform the American public, and he is being punished. Severely.See? Not simple. But if you are interested in some further reading:A Drone Whistleblower s Quest for Justice (this is an article I wrote for The Progressive, a quick overview of the case)Daniel Hale Blew the Whistle on the US’s Illegal Drone Program. He’s a Hero, Not a Criminal, by Chip Gibbons, at Jacobin. A longer and better article.Watch National Bird, a heartbreaking 2016 documentary featuring Hale and other military personnel, as well as civilian victims of our drones.Visit Stand with Daniel Hale and learn ways you can support Hale. Sorry to go on so long. I just can t stand it when bullies win, especially when they win against decent people who are just trying to tell the truth. And it s starting to feel like they win all the time.*On civilians being killed: Since 2001, unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) such as the Predator and General Atomics’ larger and more capable MQ-9 Reaper have completed thousands of missions, sometimes with unintentional consequences. While 2016 statistics released by President Obama revealed that 473 strikes had accounted for between 2,372 and 2,581 combatant deaths since 2009, according to a 2014 report in The Guardian, the civilian death toll resulting from drone strikes was, at the time, in the neighborhood of 6,000. Source. If you knew how much of my mental energy in the past few years has gone to thinking about the collected works of David Simon (including his fantastic True Crime classic Homicide, his more personal and sociological book The Corner, and of course, the TV show he wrote and produced, The Wire) you would probably be a little appalled. I can t help it. When somebody knows their business--and I think David Simon knows his business of reporting by going to where people are and hanging out with them--I am powerless to look away. So a few weekends ago I plowed through the oral history All The Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams.It s a great book, and if you re interested in how great TV is made, it s a great primer in that too. Actually, if you know any youthful aspiring drama club members or actors, this would be a very handy book about the actors (and writers , actually) craft to give to them.Abrams went and interviewed a lot of the star s main actors, writers, directors, and crew members, so the result truly gives you a picture of the TV production world (as well as of Baltimore, where the series really was filmed). Although I enjoyed the whole thing--and drove Mr. CR nuts by reading pieces of it to him all weekend long--I really enjoyed the interviews with David Simon and Ed Burns, who were the creators and main writers of the show. I also enjoyed the interviews with George Pelecanos, a crime writer who also wrote many of the show s most infamous episodes.So, consider this quote from David Simon, in which he is talking about a discussion he had with one of the actors, about the possibility of reforming systems: I had told him it was much harder to reform a system. The things that reform systems are trauma. Great trauma. Nobody gives up status quo without being pushed to the wall. I believe that politically. The great reformations of society are the result of undue excess and undue cruelty. (p. 68.)This came up at least once as he was explaining to the actors that the show itself was going to be a cruel world, where nothing was going to get fixed systemically. I was going to promote all the wrong people, and the same policies were going to go on...that s how the show ended. (p. 65.)And that s why The Wire is so hard to watch, and why it s so great.I think I was reading this one too fast to even stick bookmarks in at every part I wanted, but I m going to read it again someday. On this first pass it was just totally a much-needed and much-appreciated pleasure read. Last week my laptop crashed, so I took it to be fixed, as I am never in the mood to buy a new laptop. So my laptop spent a week at the laptop spa, and I spent a week being forced to check my email and read the Interwebs on my phone, which never stopped being annoying and which led me to wonder, yet again, how everyone can stand to be on their phones every minute. I don t do any real complex reading online, but trying to follow the thread of any story I was trying to read while only being shown two lines of text at a time on my teeny phone screen was infuriating. I know why all citizens have lost the ability to see the big picture--and that is primarily because we all spend our days looking at extremely tiny pictures.On the bright side, the week was a nice time to wean myself off my continuing and destructive recreational YouTube habit, which is cheap and doesn t require me to get a Narcan shot, but which wastes literally ALL OF MY TIME. I spent the week reading even more than usual, and it was glorious.One of the stupendous books I read was Debora Harding s true crime memoir, Dancing With the Octopus. It is the story of Harding s abduction and sexual assault when she was a very young teenager. To make the story even harder to read, Harding also slowly reveals the abuse that was present throughout her life in her own home. Although she had a close and loving relationship with her father, and good relationships with her three sisters, her mother was, if not stereotypically physically abusive, psychologically cruel and neglectful. Although she could confide some of her and her siblings problems with their mother to her father, he often worked away from home and usually refused to believe things were as bad as they said.This, then, is a memoir of family trauma and crime trauma, so it s not easy to read.But you really HAVE to read it, because you have to meet Debora Harding. This is a woman who has survived several types of abuse and trauma, which she did for a long time by mostly not admitting to herself (or others, never to others), how much she was affected by everything that happened to her. Her focus throughout the early part of the book is how she started experiencing symptoms that she did not understand, and which she slowly comes to understand are her body s delayed response to her childhood and the kidnapping. I am a huge believer that our bodies hold all our secrets and can be a mystery even to our brains, so to watch her work through the process of understanding her own physical being was powerful.This is also a powerful story about restorative justice and what happened when Harding eventually met the man who kidnapped and assaulted her. It is a story of trying to come to terms with all of her own family members, at a time when she was trying to raise her own children.I m blabbing on pointlessly here. It s a beautiful book and you need to read it. I m a total sucker for police procedurals, in both book and TV form (hello The Wire, best TV program ever), so it should come as no surprise that I found Rosa Brooks s new book Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City, to be a fascinating read. Brooks, a journalist and Georgetown University professor, decided to apply to become a reserve police officer in the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to try and understand what policing a community looks like. Although the job is a volunteer, unpaid one, it is no small undertaking; reserve police officers with the MPD go through the same police academy and eventually become sworn, armed police officers with full arrest powers (which they keep, as long as they fulfill their end of the bargain: working at least twenty-four hours of patrol each month).Brooks s narrative takes you through her application process, her academy training, and what she learned on patrol. It wasn t my favorite book ever, but it was certainly engrossing. I wasn t really surprised by most of the problems Brooks faced while patrolling or the types of calls she dealt with (that s what happens when you read a lot of depressing nonfiction and police procedurals), but I was interested to hear how difficult it can be to get in and out of your uniform and juggle all the things you have to juggle, like driving while plugging information into your car s police computer, or how many different phones and radios you have to juggle because they police-issued phones that work with the radio don t make calls, so you have to have your personal cell phone with you at all times.In another interesting twist, Brooks is also the daughter of investigative author Barbara Ehrenreich (who I sometimes enjoy reading but who is not one of my favorite NF authors), so I enjoyed the brief insights into Ehrenreich s thoughts on the police and how Brooks reacted to them.An interesting read and a sometimes enlightening one. With all the focus on what police work can be and should be, now might be a good time to read it. Mr. CR saw this book, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, by Corey Pein, on the end table and he said, Kudos to you, another depressing nonfiction book. Which I think is rich, coming from Mr. CR, who is my partner in our natural (if not ideal) habit of always imagining the worst-case scenario. He s way more bleak than me, but he hides it better, mostly because he s very, very quiet.I know. You totally want to hang out in our cheerful, laugh-a-minute home, don t you?*Anyway. He was right. This book was super depressing. It s been on that end table for a week now, because that s where I set it when I finished reading it, had a little cry, and then moved on to whatever homeschooling, caregiving, or freelancing stuff I had going on that day. I ve been trying for a week to get myself to post about this book, because I actually do think you should read it.Pein set out to live and succeed in Silicon Valley, figuring there s tons of start-up cash available there for whatever kind of start-up he might be able to dream up (and then kind of vaguely start, and then cash out of). In other words, and as the jacket copy proclaims: To truly understand the delirious reality of the tech entrepreneurs, he knew he would have to inhabit that perspective--he would have to become an entrepreneur himself. And so he does. The first hurdle, of course, is finding a place to live on a journalist s budget in Silicon Valley. It s pretty much impossible, and it involves either living with many, many other tech workers in tiny, tiny, tiny (and shared) living spaces, or actually in a tent that somebody is renting out as an Airbnb. The second hurdle is dreaming up an idea for a start-up, and then getting that idea in front of investors. Third? Try not to lose your soul.I think I left this book sitting on the end table because I knew it was going to be hard for me to do it justice in a review. It s sort of a strange concept, but there s no doubt that Pein does a very good job of dropping the reader right in the middle of Silicon Valley culture, and WOW, I find that a hugely scary place to be. The most disturbing story (for me, anyway) in a book of disturbing stories came at the end, when the author describes his and his spouse s life in India, where they lived in 2016. At that time, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, implemented a policy of demonetization, because he wanted people to move to smartphone apps for all of their transactions. So Modi s government announced that two denominations of Indian currency--two denominations that comprised nearly 90% of all cash in circulation--wouldn t be considered legal tender and had to be turned in for larger bills.That sounds fairly benign until you learn that the Indian government partnered with a tech company on a start-up app called Paytm, that was in no way able to handle the massive amounts of Indian citizens daily transactions. It was a disaster: In the cities, many sick and elderly people died in the long ATM lines--in at least one case, a doctor refused treatment after demanding cash, which was, of course, what everyone was waiting in line for. It was easy to spend an entire day traipsing from one machine to another, only to find them all out of cash. But these problems were largely invisible to India s wealthy and middle class, who hired servants to do their shopping and thus escaped the battle of will and endurance that suddenly characterized routine commerce. (p. 290.)Does that last bit sound like anywhere you know? Maybe everywhere, just recently when wealthier people paid desperate people (not enough) to go out and do their shopping or driving or other basic commerce for them? I thought, huh, I m surprised no politician here has demanded that we all turn in cash and use only a Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos approved/created payment app.Then I remembered, that just hasn t happened YET.I know, it s depressing. Read this book anyway.*Actually, we all do laugh a lot. First off, the CRjrs are hilarious little animals, and also, if you have an absurdist sense of humor, there is a LOT of material in our current world at which to laugh.

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A blog on all things nonfiction by Sarah Statz Cords (nonfiction reader, author, freelance librarian, indexer, and oftentimes crank).

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