Month: August 2014

by Bill McKibben and Sue Halpern

We used to think we worked pretty hard, but that was before we agreed to help out this week in Andrew’s absence. As Dish guest-bloggers we were each doing three posts a day, and the pressure seemed unrelenting – we’d sigh the minute one went up on the site because it felt like the countdown clock was ticking already. It felt like Lucy on that chocolate assembly line. We’ve always admired this place, but now we’re in a kind of awe: we have no idea how the staff and the proprietor keep it up day after day (and we think Maureen Dowd et al are living the high life – I mean, once every three days? Come on.)

We realized, too, that though we’ve always thought of ourselves as opinionated, there are actually vast swaths of current events on which we have no useful thought at all. Vladimir Putin is clearly a bad guy, but God knows what we should do about him. Ditto Libya. There are other questions, happily, where we can subcontract our opinion-forming to each other: anything to do with computers and internets, for instance, is Sue’s domain, for instance. Ditto butterflies, dogs, and how the brain works. Bill, as you may have noticed, is good on climate change and also climate change. But that leaves a little uncovered; which is why the crowd wisdom that comes with a Dish subscription seems like such a good value.

The one other thing we both know a little about is journalism.

We’ve written for pretty much everyone there is to write for over the years. It’s an honor to have added the Dish to that list: there’s good work going on here, and in quantity. We always knew Andrew was remarkable;  now we have a sense of the depth of the bench. Thanks to them for making this week so smooth for us.

Since we’re good Vermonters, we’ll conclude with a small going away present, our very own (and very simple) granola recipe, which we make each and every week. Since soon the days will start to cool, you might want to make it too:

Preheat oven to 250

In big bowl, mix 10 cups oats with a cup or two or even three of chopped pecans and cashews

Mix in 1/2 cup oil, 1 cup maple syrup, and 1/2 cup water

Spread over two lightly greased cookie sheets

Bake 30 minutes, turn over with a spatula

Return to over for 30 minutes and then, when the timer goes off, simply turn off the heat and let it sit in the over for a few hours till it cools

In our experience, if you eat this, you will start to favor single-payer health insurance, despise big oil companies, and hope Bernie Sanders runs for president. It’s our second-favorite morning Dish.

(Photo by Robert S. Donovan)

by Dish Staff

Christopher Knight spent nearly three decades living alone in the woods of Maine, earning him the nickname “the North Pond Hermit,” before getting caught for theft and sentenced to prison. Michael Finkel asked Knight about what he learned from a solitary, hardscrabble existence:

Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”

True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn’t at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. “I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I’d rather take it to my grave.” The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.

“But you must have thought about things,” I said. “About your life, about the human condition.”

Chris became surprisingly introspective.

“I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild. He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn’t tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.

“Get enough sleep.”

He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying more. This is what he’d learned. I accepted it as truth.

(Photo by Flickr user Ctd 2005)

by Dish Staff

Paul Seaton pans novelist Marilynne Robinson’s political commentary, claiming that her “high intelligence and humane sensibility seem to flee her when she looks to her right”:

In literary terms, Marilynne Robinson is a national treasure. In political terms, not so much. “When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid,” as the nursery rhyme has it. Robinson might not even mind my saying that, by the way. As an essayist she deliberately tries to make countercultural moves, intellectually and spiritually.

Unfortunately, Robinson’s political views as expressed in her latest collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, are far from countercultural if by that we mean unusual. They’re off-the-shelf liberal. Like her hero, President Obama, she is disinclined to be fair to those who disagree with her—social conservatives, Tea Partiers, Republicans, the Right. Social conservative concerns for the moral standards and social fabric of the country, reasonable apprehensions about entitlements, the national debt, the injustice of burdening following generations because of our shirking of responsibility, and serious concerns about constitutional infidelity, become distorted by her into ungenerosity and rank partisanship.

Carl Scott adds:

Robinson, a Calvinist, is arguably a product of an earlier time, but it remains significant that our liberal churches provide a religious home for people like her. It is out of such churches, I dare to hope, that there may come the leaders necessary to reform/moderate/cleanse the Democratic Party, or at least one wing of it, if the hour for that long-needed movement ever arrives. And she is of course right that there is a deep connection between modern democracy and Calvinism, as our Ralph Hancock has explored.

Peter Lawler also offers measured appreciation for some of her ideas:

Robinson’s narrative is about the authentically Puritanical American Left, which wouldn’t, of course, be embraced by most of our liberals today. I wish more of today’s Christian leftists would at least join her battle against scientism, against those who deny the real existence of the wondrous love that’s at the foundation of the truth about human exceptionalism. The ”social justice” emphasis of our liberal churches these days gives little to no attention to the actual theology she’s recovered that once justified generous political progressivism.

by Sue Halpern

Every so often a random confluence of articles makes it possible to see into the future with the clearest of crystal balls. In this case, the articles come from The New York Times and Harper’s, and the story they tell together should give us all pause. For years we’ve heard about how Americans were lousy savers, and how a significant segment of the population had done a poor job of planning for retirement. We heard less about what was going to happen to those people when they were no longer steady earners. But now we know.

Writing in the Times’ money column, David Wallis puts a romantic sheen on it: “Increasingly, Retirees Dump Their possessions and Hit the Road.” Shedding the house and mortgage and sleeping on other people’s couches in one’s late middle age is shown to be a wonderful adventure. One can travel the world, help others, live unencumbered. Here’s fifty-year-old Stacy Monday, who used to be a paralegal:

“I sold everything I had,” Ms. Monday recalled earlier this summer from San Francisco before she headed to Las Vegas, Dallas, Memphis and Knoxville. “I paid off all of my debt. I have no bills and no money.” She estimates that she now spends $150 a month — sometimes less if she is saving up for a flight — and earns a modest income through “odds-and-ends jobs,” as well as the tip jar on her blog.

To stick to her tight budget, Ms. Monday volunteers for nonprofits and organic farms in exchange for room and board or finds free places to stay through Couchsurfing.org. The company puts its membership of people 50 and older at about 250,000.

So that is one vision of the future: American retirees, unrooted, becoming, in the words of one of them, “Bedouins.”

And here is another:

older Americans who can’t retire, and don’t have a house and possessions to sell, also roaming around, putting miles on their vehicles as they look for work here and there. According to yet another Times piece, “the number of workers employed through temp agencies has climbed to a new high — 2.87 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they represent a record share of the nation’s work force, 2 percent.” And some of them, it turns out, according to Jessica Bruder in Harper’s (subscribers only), live hand-to-mouth in their trailers, in Joad-like encampments, having been recruited to harvest beets or pull items for Amazon packages at barely minimum wages. According to Bruder, “Amazon first hired a handful of migrant full-time RVers in 2008 through a program the company later named CamperForce. As of 2014, it had expanded to employ some 2,000 workers, according to a recruiter I met in Quartzsite, Arizona.”

And she goes on:

The ads [for CamperForce] are surreal. They sound like an invitation to summer camp, and not just the ones for Amazon jobs. “Feel like a kid again!” and “Hey workamper, it’s time for fun!” are a couple slogans used by recruiters for Adventureland, a theme park in Altoona, Iowa where migrant workers run the rides, games and concessions for $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. Recruitment materials for the beet harvest, with 12-hour overnight shifts in subzero temperatures, refer to the work as “an unBEETable experience!”

This stuff is propaganda, pure and simple. It panders to the illusion that older Americans are free to retire, working only for fun, rather than acknowledging the reality that many folks need to keep bringing in money to survive.

The Harper’s article is not online for non-subscribers, but a haunting interview with Bruder is, and is worth reading.

Happy Labor Day!

(Photo of trailer park by Matthew Hester)