The Dish

Urban heat islands are man-made areas marked by significantly higher temperatures relative to rural surroundings.  A new study finds that “blacks, Asians, and Latinos are all significantly more likely to live in high-risk heat-island conditions than white people”:

[Researchers] compared Census population data with the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset, mediating for factors such as income, home ownership, and density. Richer folks of color who own their homes are less likely to live in a heat island than the poor, but still significantly more likely than whites. The study doesn’t point to causality, but does mention past and present lending practices which have concentrated people of color in dense, urban neighborhoods that may or may not receive the same level of civic investment as other areas.

Translation: This study highlights the persistent racial segregation of urban areas more than it does a lack of trees. All told, this is just yet another amenity that people of color are losing out on. … It’s not just a potential discomfort, but a serious health risk, when extreme heat is a factor in about one in five deaths resulting from natural hazards.

Ngoc Nguyen at New American Media interviewed study co-author Dr. Rachel Morello-Frosch:

NAM: What accounts for greater [heat] island risk in hyper-segregated cities?

RMF: What we are seeing in the physical environment — the planting of trees and infrastructure that tries to decrease heat island risk in cities — these kind of investments, you tend to see less of in places with high levels of racial inequality. The physical environment in cities is a reflection of the social environment, and it tends to disadvantage people of color particularly.

It’s possible in cities with higher levels of segregation, there is less investment to protect people from [heat] island risk, such as tree-planting campaigns, greening of space and neighborhood, reduction in impervious surfaces that really absorb heat, whiter roofs, those kinds of things, certain levels of public investment.

NAM: What was surprising in the study findings?

RMF: In metropolitan areas with greater levels of racial segregation, everyone — whites included – were more likely to live in heat-prone areas … what this shows is that, in some ways segregation adversely affects everyone. This form of social inequality affects everyone. Segregated places have much higher [heat] island risk compared to less segregated places.

A reader writes:

I think what Ms. Gallagher and Card himself don’t understand (or willfully ignore) is the fact that no one – NO ONE – has said that Mr. Card shouldn’t be allowed to publish his books or have a movie made of his important, seminal novel.  No one wants a McCarthy-like blacklist.  What many of us are angry about is that a book we love might be used to support the frankly repugnant rhetoric of an organization like NOM, of which Card is a member of the board.  Freedom of speech does not mean that you’re free of societal scorn.  I owe Card a lot for teaching me how to be a better writer, and Ender’s Game is a beautiful, heartbreaking book.  But I might not see it because then my ticket would be subsidizing a hate-group.  That’s the issue, point blank.

Another draws another distinction:

Boycotting Wal-Mart and Exxon is one thing. It’s their business practices that make them despicable, and doing business with them encourages those practices.  Boycotting Ender’s Game solves nothing except discourage smart fiction writing.

Another:

I am quite familiar with Ender’s Game, having read it several times, including recently, and I would say with confidence that there is no homophobic element to it.

That’s one reason I was so shocked to find out Card felt so strongly. The book, in fact, is notable for its characters almost asexual lives. They’re children, for the most part. They are interested in very adult things – war and world politics among them – but their sexuality is basically an unexplored province.

Further, I would add – NOT as a defense of Card’s view – that writers in general, and science fiction writers in particular, are idiosyncratic, opinionated, and sometimes insane people. It’s an activity that requires one to basically live in one’s head, and pay much more attention to the world created there than the world outside. Orson Scott Card is a bigot, but he’s an old bigot who should just shut up and write his stories, and whose non-fictional utterances should be heard by no one but his family and any who intentionally befriend him.

Another is more skeptical:

Does Card’s homophobia influence his art? Well, the aliens in Ender’s Game are called “buggers”.

Another looks at Card’s subsequent works:

Ender’s Game is the beginning of a sequence of books (it is followed by Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) as well as a subsequent set of books that follow the same overall story from the point of view of different characters (Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow of the Giant).  In these books, particularly the “Shadow” books, the issue of gay marriage does get inserted and unsurprisingly rejected by the relevant character in the story.  With the caveat that it’s been quite a while since I read it, even this sequence in the books, which is not even central to the plot – which I grant makes it a rather gratuitous political self-indulgence on Card’s part, but hey, it’s his book! – I didn’t have a sense of homophobia from the character or, by extension, the author.  Rather, the issue is presented as one of how society should be structured, but the gay character is at that point essentially one of the good guys, and is not in any way ostracized or harassed, and is treated with respect.

If anything, the attitude in Card’s novels is about as open and accepting as one could ask for from a fairly orthodox, devout Mormon. I have read most of Card’s books and occasionally dip into his blog-like postings at his website hatrack.com. I disagree with a lot of his conclusions, but always respect his analysis.  Kinda like the Dish sometimes.

Update from a reader:

I’m sure I’ll be one of many, but I had to respond to the reader who noted that the aliens are called Buggers. I’ve seen it made other places, and it’s painful to hear, just about as bad as when Rush claimed ‘Bain’ in the Batman movie was to smear Romney. If people want to boycott the film, I totally get it. But please, don’t be so ignorant of the book to claim this as a reason.

Yes, while the aliens are given the official name of Formics, they are more colloquially called Buggers. Given that we were at war with them it’s not exactly shocking they were given a derisive name. But the point is *SPOILER ALERT* that at the end of the day, the whole war was just a giant miscommunication between two very difference species. For the rest of his life, Ender will try to undo the damage he caused the Buggers and live with immense guilt about how he treated them. The future conversation about the war will be about how horrible humanity treated the buggers and how much blame should Ender receive. If the goal was to put down homosexuality, Card did an incredibly horrible job of it.

I think most readers of Card’s work have the same shocked reaction to finding out his views, because they simply don’t come through in the books. The series I keep rethinking about since finding out about his views is the Earthfall series, not the Ender’s Game series. One of male characters is gay, and another female one has written offensive theories about how people become gay. The female one is the one who ends up finding out she is wrong and is extremely embarrassed and ashamed. However, the two end up marrying and having kids together anyhow, in a “need to repopulate the world” situation. The understanding they come to is that they always use a particular position (I’m sure you can guess which) and he be allowed to be thinking about his former lovers during. I have no idea how to read/think about this section anymore.

Spurred by voters in Portland, Oregon who defeated a bill that would have provided for the fluoridation of their drinking water, Mark Oppenheimer decries the trend of “left-wing Puritanism”. He relays this telling anecdote:

Last month, at a birthday party for a three-year-old, I was hit with the realization that most of the parents around me were in the grip of moral panic, the kind of fear of contamination dramatized so well in The Crucible. One mother was trying to keep her daughter from eating a cupcake, because of all the sugar in cupcakes. Another was trying to limit her son to one juice box, because of all the sugar in juice. A father was panicking because there was no place, in this outdoor barn-like space at some nature center or farm or wildlife preserve, where his daughter could wash her hands before eating. And while I did not hear any parent fretting about the organic status of the veggie dip, I became certain there were such whispers all around me.

His broader argument about the meaning of liberalism:

I am only suggesting that we resist thinking of Puritanism as the only, or optimal, parenting style for liberals, for two reasons.

First, thinking that Puritanism—whether a preference for organic foods or natural fibers or home-birthing—is somehow constitutive of a liberal politics is rather insulting to liberalism. Most of the middle-class “liberal” parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society; they have no particular beliefs about how to end poverty or strengthen the labor movement, and they don’t understand Obamacare, or really want to. It’s enough that they make their midwife-birthed children substitute guava nectar for sugar.

But more important, realizing that Puritanism does not equal liberalism liberates us to think of another way to be liberal: by rejecting the kind of stress that comes from Puritanism. They say hygienic reform; I say the 30-hour work week and not stressing if my children eat Kix. Liberalism, as the political philosopher Corey Robin has recently argued, should be above all about freedom. The best reasons to want a labor union, or universal health care, or Social Security are to be free of worry, want, and privation, and to be out from under the hand of the boss. It makes no sense to re-enslave ourselves with fear, worry, and stress. That is not liberal but reactionary.

Arit John adds a point of contrast:

[C]onservative parents have generally become relatively more open-minded. Lenore Skenazy was famously called the worst mom in America after admitting that she let her 9-year-old ride New York’s subway home alone. But really, she’s just instilling her kids with self reliance and pull-yourself-up- by-your-bootstraps-grit. Skenazy’s Free Range Kids movement supports events like “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” which is both self-explanatory and (potentially) horrifying. And yet none of her children has gone missing or been taken away by the authorities.

All those liberal worries about about obesity, high blood pressure, germs, autism and industrial chemicals, is leading to a lot of stress, which may in the end be more harmful than anything. Your bickering about the virtues of antibacterial hand lotion might give your kid a complex.

Reviewing historian Richard Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill, Ben Wetzel traces the history of the now-famous phrase:

[Gamble] argues that the phrase “city on a hill” (found in Matthew 5:14) originally described the mission of the church, but that over time the secular state has come to exert a near monopoly over the image.

Gamble begins the book with surprising observations about [Puritan leader John] Winthrop’s famous discourse, A Modell of Christian Charity.  Much is unknown about the circumstances surrounding the sermon’s composition.  Indeed, since no one onboard the Arbella (the ship that transported the Puritans from England to Massachusetts) ever left any record of the message, and since Winthrop himself never mentioned giving the speech in his journal, Gamble concludes that it is possible that the governor never delivered the discourse at all.  In any case, Gamble points out, Winthrop could hardly have been envisioning the United States, whose tenets of toleration, individualism, and democracy the governor would have found appalling.

Proceeding in time, Gamble traces the fate of the “city on a hill” throughout American history.  Jonathan Edwards, for example, used the image in the 1730s to describe his Northampton congregation, but did so usually to chastise his church for failing to uphold true godliness.  When Edwards used the image, however, he was not alluding to Winthrop’s vision, because A Modell of Christian Charity was not published until 1838.  Few observers in the 1830s noted its appearing, and none thought they saw the origins of the American mission in its contents.  Indeed, over the next century, writers who quoted from the document almost never drew attention to the “city on a hill” passage at all.

That changed dramatically by the late 20th century:

[I]t was not an academic but a politician who first used the phrase in a more public setting.  And his name was not Ronald Reagan.  Instead, John F. Kennedy (reading a speech prepared by his aide Ted Sorenson) declared to the Massachusetts state legislature in 1961 that he “had been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.”  And then: “‘We must always consider’ [Winthrop] said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill–the eyes of all people are upon us.'”  Clearly, as Gamble points out, the Irish-Catholic Kennedy’s conception of the “city on a hill” was a far cry from what Winthrop would have envisioned in the seventeenth century, let alone what Jesus was describing in the gospel of Matthew.

It is unclear if Reagan learned of the phrase directly from Kennedy or picked it up elsewhere, but in any case the Great Communicator made the image his own in the last third of the twentieth century.  As with Kennedy, Reagan’s use of the “city on a hill” was largely devoid of any specifically Christian content.  Instead, as the high priest of America’s civil religion, Reagan deployed the image as a stand-in for a vague Americanism.  Although some critics of the president, such as New York governor Mario Cuomo, argued that there was a good bit wrong with the “shining city,” for the most part the phrase had been adopted by both parties and emptied of any prophetic content by the end of the twentieth century.