Doorstep to Revolution

I trade in food, helpfully, not harmfully like Monsanto.

Down the hall in our building live a single mother, 32, and her daughter, 11.

The mother, delivered in Clearwater by a doctor I know, now a retired University

of British Columbia medical professor, had a hard life.  She grew up in many places and

moved to this building three years ago.  She was a heroin addict, but her daughter shows

no ill effects, although she sometimes stays with relatives when her mother is not

dependable.  They're on welfare; the mother is on methodone.  Budgeting is a challenge,

although the best budgeters are the poor, because they have the least room for error.

Sometimes they're low on food and other household necessities.   Mom asks and we give.

They rely on the food bank, for whose initials FB they have a whimscal name.

Lately, she has given us food, usually what she gets from the food bank but doesn't like.

The five-pound bag of enriched flour that she gave us a couple weeks ago will be part of the

oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that I plan to make to bring to library events this week:  a

local science fiction author's reading on Wednesday, the film The Fruitpickers on Thursday.

The chocolate chips came from Surplus Herbie's, which operates in Williams Lake and Kamloops.  Their stock comes from bankrupt stores.   I feed off chocolate chips that came from a store that

feeds off other stores.  Hamlet talked about a fish eating a worm, a king eating

the fish, and worms later eating the dead king.  I found a similar story this month in the Ancient

Greek writer Herodotus's history of the wars between the Greeks and Persians.  A king throws his ring in the water, a fish eats the ring, and a fisher catches the fish and gives it to the king, who gets
his ring back.   Surplus Herbie's sells fishing gear, but no rings for kings. 

The library will get my cookies because last week I found a great book on the new books shelf: 

Paul d'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism.  I hope that book isn't why the local employment

office has a job posting for a new librarian.  The York University graduate whom the library hired

a couple years ago started the film series, and might have brought the book.  If she's still there

this week, then I'll commend her.   The USian d'Amato, who writes for the Socialist Worker,

gave me refreshing Trotskyism after my years of enduring Vancouver Stalinists,

New Democratic Party heartbreakers, and Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper, hot air versus hot oil.

Trotskyism:  the pause that refreshes, available at a revolution near you.

That trading background painted, in glowing red, I now write of food trading.  This differs from the  English trading away Irish corn and grain while Irish people starved in the 1840s, trading away rice to starve India during World War Two, from India now trading its land and water to corporate agriculture and thereby causing farmer suicides, and from the US trading subsidized corn to Mexico, impoverishing its farmers off the land and into wage slavery or drug trading.   I write of fair trade in food.

 Today was the first time that this single mother and I traded food on the doorstep.  Weeks ago, my daughter received the flour but I don't recall what she gave.  I'm sure she traded fairly.  I'm no mercantilist, monopolizing trade. 

We're free traders, but more like the Zapatistas than like the corporate free traders who

drove the Zapatistas toward revolution. 

Gunfire set aside for later, this single mother, not the Zapatistas, knocked on my door today.  She had an empty margarine container in one had and some food items in the other hand.  She asked

for butter and juice, not The Last Tango in Paris, nor did I offer it.  I gave her two 1/2-cup margarine chunks, leaving myself enough to make the cookies.  I shun margarine and only have this margarine

because months ago my daughter asked for it.  It has languished in the freezer.  I also gave a can of

concentrated frozen iced tea and one of grape punch, thawed. 

In her other hand, she held, not an Kalashnikov rifle, happily, but a vegetable Mr. Noodles, a 284 mL can of sweet peas, and a 398 mL can of baked beans in tomato sauce.  She offered them to me and I accepted.  I think the AK47 takes different ammunition. 

The Kalashnikov's inventor recently died, his Russian rifle still the best.  Look for it the next time you find yourself revolting.  Some find you revolting already.  Many find me revolting, but as the English singer Billy Bragg says, "If you've got a blacklist, I wanna be on it." 

As I finish typing this, I remember d'Amato's argument that communal kitchens, laundry, and child care would reduce women's double burden, of work outside and work inside the home. 

The "coincidence of wants," about which I learned in university economics, also crosses my mind. These economics aren't d'Amato's, but I learned his economics at university, too, from of a Marxist professor from Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh, where 90 000 worked in the steel industry at its postwar peak, has given away that industry, but the city re-invented itself as a cultural mecca, CBC Radio "Ideas" recently said.  The host hoped that Canada's former steel city, Hamilton, would reinvent itself, education and medical industries prime candidates for the job.      

The "coincidence of wants" means having what another wants when she has what you want.  This

is so unlikely that a means of exchange, that is, money, arose.  More likely, such coincidences would

be like the Bible story about asking someone for a loaf of bread and getting a serpent. 

What if  she came to my door with something I don't want and wanted something I didn't have?

If she came to my door with an AK-47 and a serpent, then I would know that she was either in an undependable phase, or that she had risen from her lumpenproletarian ennui to foment revolution, or that she was joining a herptologist group, or a wacky religion.  I'd make cookies for that. 

My crockpot is full of broccoli stalks, cabbage,  and potatoes now.  It wouldn't hold a serpent.

Some religious people hold serpents, but that's another sermon.  I'd rather hold a serpent than

heed most sermons, including those from conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, and more overt religious folks, each group itching to patent the truth.

I used to know everything.  I don't anymore.  Now I'm easier to get along with. 

When we speak of trade, we approach one of many inefficiencies of capitalism, that is,

advertising, which pressures us to buy what we don't want and pay what we can't spare. 

d'Amato's socialism doesn't need advertising.   In that vein, Thorsten Veblen, the early-1900s

Norwegian economist, called advertising wasteful when it did anything more than provide information.

Ah, if only socialism itself needed only a little advertising to supplant our exploitative system.

Use value, exchange value, iced tea, beans, dreams and schemes, eh?   

Fossils, Beetles, Palms, Temperature, and Freedom

Thursday, September 12, 2013

The North American Cordillera has at least four important insect fossil sites, Simon Fraser University entomologist Bruce Archibald told a group of 20 people last in Williams Lake on September 11. 
Archibald used these sites to link beetles and temperature 50 million years ago.

HOMAGE

Archibald began by paying homage to Buffon and Von Humboldt, Enlightenment thinkers whose probing of nature enhanced human reason, progress, and, I would argue, freedom.  He also noted his current research, on lacewings, whose intricate wing patterns are beautiful as well as useful, as the Ancient Roman writer Horace advised our lives and work to be.  English zoologist Richard Dawkins argues that the natural world is more beautiful and inspiring than any religion, with its anti-intellectual strictures and anthropomorphic hereafter.   

SITES
  
From south to north, these sites are Republic, in Oregon, United States, and Quilchena, McAbee, and Driftwood Canyon in British Columbia, Canada. 

I saw one site, McAbee.  In 1999, when I was teaching at the nearby indigenous community of Skeetchestn, I brought a group of children to McAbee.  We looked but we did not touch.  The children marveled at fossilized sea creatures on what they knew as a desert hilltop.   Psychologists note that such mental challenges enhance reasoning. 

ANTI-SCIENTIFIC GOVERNMENT

A few years later, a new, reactionary provincial government removed protection from the site.  Anyone could then go there and chip away, which one paleontologist called equivalent to letting people with chisels and hammers into the Sistine Chapel.  Happily, scientists and a local opposition member of the provincial legislature have since convinced the government to restrict access again. 

Beetles were Archibald's focus.  His cameras focused finely enough to show fossilized insect hairs and encased soft tissue 50 million years old.  At the end of the talk, I cited the science fiction film Jurassic Park about dinosaurs recreated in our era using fossilized DNA.  Extract soft-tissue DNA and reproduce these insects.   The soft tissue was sex cells, which contain only half the chromosomes, however, as the movie contained only half-baked science; but ancient soft tissues might tell us how much the insects changed over millions of years, which relates to the accuracy of Archibald's theory. 

Alas, Archibald lacks the funding to do what he does now, let alone explore other under-researched areas:  other scientists, who study bats and leaves, among other things, subsidize his work because it relates to theirs.  Bats, for example, use echolocation to hunt.  Some of Archibald's beetles have an organ that detects bats' echolocation signals, thereby enhancing the beetles' survival against predation by bats.  Richard Dawkins writes fascinatingly on echolocation evolution.  An equation using the ratio between jagged and smooth-edged leaves, for example, reveals past temperature and even predicts future temperature.   This commendable collaboration among scientists arises from government indifference or hostility toward science as well as from scientists' intentions. 

"If you want to research how to move oil, the government will give you a grant.  Anything else, good luck," Archibald quipped.  Archibald rejoiced that Parks Canada paid for his gas to come from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby to Williams Lake, 500 kilometres north.  He uses the cameras at Parks Canada's Vancouver research facility,but better resolution would help his research.  A person in the audience noted the University of Victoria's new electron microscope, news to Archibald; but he and Archibald agreed that the queue is long and the access is expensive.  "Insects become oil," the person joked.  "Tell the government that."    
 
BEETLE AND TEMPERATURE LINK

Archibald's theory proposes a link between a particular beetle, the palm beetle, and temperature.  This beetle only eats palm leaves.  Palm trees do not grow where the winter temperature falls below five degrees celsius, or below eight degrees in climates of increased carbon dioxide, such as humans have made. 

This summer, measurement at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Telescope found atmospheric carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million.  Climate change activist Bill McKibbon cites a sea of evidence that predicts irreversible global warming at carbon dioxide levels above 350 parts per million.    
Archibald noted 50 million year old fossilized palm seeds in Antarctica, still linked to Australia but then separating from South America.  The climate has warmed before, but never as fast as it has warmed since humanity's massive burning of fossil fuels. 

Archibald's team found fossilized palm beetles, 50 million years old, in three of the four sites.  They found none in Driftwood Canyon, at 54 degrees north latitude the most northerly site.  They therefore concluded that, 50 million years ago, palms grew in these places.  These sites are between two and three thousand kilometres north of where palms grow today.        

REASON, PROGRESS, AND FREEDOM

As I type this story, I remember another beetle story I encountered, years ago in Vancouver.  I also think about reason, progress, and freedom.

Beetles proliferate on Earth, luckily for Earth, and for us, I learned years ago at  Science World, a science education centre in Vancouver.  Archibald's mention of the hundreds of species of beetles was not news to me:  Charles Darwin wrote extensively about beetles.  A Vancouver presentation about dung beetles was, however, news that I long remembered; but there, as in Archibald's work, I found a reasoned link between different parts of the natural world.  Dung beetles, of which there are many species, eat dead organic matter.  Without such decomposition, life as we know it, including human life, could not long continue.  Dead matter would overwhelm living matter, a veritable biospheric zombie cataclysm.

Zombie Cataclysm, a good name for a musical group?

Reason helps us connect such natural phenomenon as palm beetles, palms, and temperature, to connect dung beetles, decomposition, and life.  Genesis, like many of the books of the Bible, like  most religious people, uncritical, pushy, slavish servants, long dissuaded  people from reasoning, from opposing dominant views, from progress.

Thanks to critical thinkers such as Carolus Linneaus, his Latinized name a taxonomical testimony to his inquiring mind, our species fell from its muddling metaphysical perch into the natural world.  The dung beetles welcomed us, especially after we died.  Aristotle before him and scientists after him have hypothesized about nature, and used observation and experiment to prove or disprove those hypotheses.   

The monk Gregor Mendel left his Bible to cross pea plants, happily for humanity, to whom hybridization is more useful and beautiful than Bibles.  Mendel's work explained species divergence, a puzzle to Charles Darwin, whose titanic work on evolution was a few decades before Mendel.  A few decades after Mendel, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick detailed the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule, the elegant code of genetic transmission.

Genetic Transmission, another musical group name?

Genetics is only one branch of science that has brought progress, both material and intellectual.  A  scientist might not know where her research will lead, to a better battery or to a better bomb.  The scientific method, however, has led us from the captivity of cults, both religious and scientific. We have a widespread, durable freedom to question, to challenge accepted wisdom, to err, and to correct our errors; but sometimes to wallow in our errors when complacency, gain, or authority defeat reason.

Curiosity and freedom led me to listen to Bruce Archibald talk about beetles.

Curiosity and Freedom, another musical group name?     

Bookstores, Gone and Free

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Kamloops lost a great used bookstore this year:

http://www.atsecondglance.com/

 http://www.cbc.ca/kamloops/mt/2012/12/final-chapter-for-at-second-glance-books-in-kamloops.html

At A Second Glance Bookstore had first one, then two, then one location in Kamloops, a city of
80 000 in the arid Thompson River Valley 400 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, Canada.

Decades ago, At A Second Glance began, across the river from downtown Kamloops.  By the late-1990s, it moved downtown.  Soon it expanded to two downtown locations.  In the early 2000s, Chapters Indigo, which is to independent, progressive bookstores what a fox is to chickens, drove out of business the downtown Kamloops new bookstore.  While Chapters was funding illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, At a Second Glance was bursting at its two downtown locations.

At A Second Glance asked its customers to help it move from its two downtown locations to the location vacated by the bankrupt new bookstore.   People lined up, an arm's length apart, along the several city blocks necessary to move the books.  They passed piles of books hand-to-hand to help move At A Second Glance.  For another decade it puttered along, across from the city's public library.

Last winter, At A Second Glance went out of business.  Downtown Kamloops now has no bookstores, used or new.  The city's west end, up a hill along the Trans Canada Highway, sports a smaller used bookstore attached to the building that holds a big grocery store.  Above that, Chapters squats by the highway, a glitzy predator of Canada's book trade.

In the early 2000s, Prince George, a city of 80 000 about 800 kilometres north northeast of Vancouver, lost Mosquito Books.  Its owners retired to their previous home near Smithers, a city of 10 000, 400 kilometres west of Prince George.  Mosquito Books, like Vancouver Co-Op Bookstore, stocked progressive magazines and books such as Chapters does not stock.  Downtown Prince George still has Books and Company, which has a few used books, squished in back shelves behind its new books and cafe:

  http://www.booksandcompany.ca/Home.html


Happily, MacLeod's Books endures in downtown Vancouver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAvoEnwSc2Y

This is my favorite used bookstore.  At A Second Glance was a close Number Two.  I hope the landlords who helped dispatch At A Second Glance have no equivalent vultures trying to dispatch MacLeod's, in high-rent  Downtown Vancouver.  This place's basement has the biggest collection of history books I've seen outside university libraries.  

The best-organized used bookstore I saw is Russell Books in Victoria, at the southwest corner of Canada:

http://www.russellbooks.com/


Back in Vancouver, People's Coop Bookstore, begun in the 1940s, endures:

http://www.peoplescoopbookstore.com/

People's, in the socialist mainstream, is my favorite new bookstore. 

In a philosophical eddy of that stream floats Spartacus Books, in Vancouver's famous Downtown Eastside:

http://www.spartacusbooks.net/

Spartacus has anarchist, Communist, gay, lesbian, queer, feminist, and cultural criticism books and music, new and used.  It resisted eviction and is a meeting place for various radical groups.  Like People's Co-Op, it advertises events such as speeches, meetings, and rallies.  Both bookstores exude an air of critical thought, something that Chapters' air conditioning would probably extract.

Then there are free books, such as found in "Share Sheds" adjacent to dumps in my home region, the Cariboo, between Kamloops and Prince George.  This week, I found Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in my local Share Shed.  I read it when I was 17.  What will I see differently in it now that I am over 50?  The local public library does not have this novel, but it has a couple others by the great Russian writer.  I read and gave away more Dostoevsky than my library stocks. but Karamazov was my first of his, and my first Russian novel.   

This month, I found an oasis of free books in Kelowna, a city of 130 000, 400 kilometres east northeast of Vancouver.  We were moving our daughter there for university.

More than 10 years ago, a retired woman rankled at the sight of a truck dumping books into a compactor at the Kelowna city dump.  She put a shed for books by the dump.  She and various volunteer helpers move books from the shed to her garage, a well-sorted operation that welcomes anyone to have almost any book for free:

 http://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/162877666.html     

I noticed Sophocles, Ovid, and other great authors, whose works I first read in a university Classics course in Ottawa.   Early Christians burned the great library at Alexandria, according to Michael Parenti in History as Mystery:

http://www.michaelparenti.org/HistoryAsMystery.html

Fewer than ten of Sophocles' 70+ plays survived to our time.  I thought of that as I noticed Sophocles' plays in that Kelowna garage, in books saved from destruction.  This garage's owner seemed like a Medieval Irish monk burying Homer in the peat bog, to save him from marauding Vikings:  my Irish and Norwegian ancestors in battle.  

While book burners, book monopolists, and book compactors busily suppress knowledge that threatens or inconveniences them, legions of people preserve and promote knowledge.  Smaller legions promote critical thought, fueled by knowledge, catalyzed by reflection and argument.   

At A Second Glance is gone, Mosquito Books is gone; but MacLeod's, Russell, People's Co-Op, and Spartacus remain, while Chapters and its ilk careen across the intellectual landscape.  Like our small, furry mammalian ancestors who outlived the dinosaurs, these bookstores' legacy will endure, when the last predatory bookstore is a quirky fossil.  

Spartacus was the name of early-1900s German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg's movement.  The latest issue of Briarpatch, a magazine I get from Regina, about 1800 kilometres east southeast of my home, argues that Luxemburg's analysis of capitalism and its defects is relevant to our era:

http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/more-than-a-hero

The German Social Democratic Party government assassinated her in 1919, but Rosa's words and ideas live, thanks partly to books.

So stop reading this and pick up a book, eh?