Cooking like it's 1950

On Saturday, I shopped for food and cooked dinner in a way that probably resembles how my women shopped and cooked in the 1950s and long before. I walked to Reading Terminal Market and went from shop to shop to buy fresh ingredients. I picked up pasta, freshly cut to the width I requested, spices at the spice shop, fresh cheese at the cheese shop, and produce at the produce shop. On the way home, I stopped at a bakery to get a loaf of bread. This all took a lot longer than a typical grocery shopping trip--close to two hours--but then, it was an outing in itself. I stopped to gawk at the chocolate shop, grabbed a water ice to eat on my walk home, then sat in Rittenhouse Square for a bit.

I cooked without the t.v. on, using the ingredients I'd purchased earlier in the day. Somehow, as I was chopping vegetables, sauteing garlic, and sipping a drink, I felt a sense of relaxation slip over me. Something about how closely you have to attend to details--whether the garlic has gotten brown enough yet in the saute pan, or if the parsley is chopped finely enough--makes me feel the way I feel when I meditate. It occurred to me that cooking for women in past generations was a lot more work than it is now, and they had a lot more people to feed, but I wonder whether they might yet feel this sense of peace from the task.

Power in the Passive Voice

A number of random topics that had been swirling through my mind lately--the economic recession, Foucault, how power works, and good writing--came together when I read a post by Barbara Ehrenriech at the TPM Cafe blog. Ehrenreich is a writer made famous by her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In this recent post on the recession, she wrote:

We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about “the economy” and “the recession” we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.

This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with “the economy,” we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand.

Suddenly a couple of things clicked for me. I've been taking a class called "Culture, Power, Identities" in which we've been discussing how to define power and how it works. One author we read--and who I've read in almost every graduate seminar I have ever taken--is the late French theorist Michel Foucault. One of the many irritating things about Foucault, for me, is that he defines power in the passive voice. Power is imposed upon people, is embedded in society; people are constantly being surveyed and defined. But where, as another theorist has put it, is the doer behind the deed? For Foucault, "power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted 'above' society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of."

This is the sort of power relation Ehrenreich is talking about when she describes how we talk about being in a recession or the economy being bad. There is no doer behind the deed. But what Ehrenreich gets--and maybe Foucault didn't--was that there are people to blame. Particular people and corporations do have power over our aspects of our lives.

Just one example: Gas prices didn't just happen to explode to over $3/gallon because of lurking forces; the oil companies decide what to charge to maximize their profit. With millions of Americans having trouble affording gas and other commodities which cost more because of the high price of gas, Exxon's CEO roped in a $21.7 million dollar pay package this year and the company's profits hit record levels.

We try not to write in the passive voice because we need our readers to know who the actors are. We should do the same when we think about the country's economic problems. We may not be able to "radically efface" those in power, but hopefully we can at least bring them down to size.

HBO Does John Adams

I can never decide whether to cringe or rejoice when I hear that there is going to be a television show or movie focusing on early America. I enjoy getting the sense of being there through the set and costume, but unfortunately, those are often the most accurate parts. HBO's mini-series John Adams is a bit better than most Hollywood attempts at history, but it falls into the usual trap of oversimplifying events and glorifying the main character.

Let's face it, John Adams wasn't easy to like in his own time; he referred to himself as obnoxious. But since HBO is basing the show on David McCollough's adoring bio of Adams, we have to like Adams at the expense of the other players. Worst perhaps in Jefferson--not surprising--who came off in Part 2 as a background player who just happened to write the Declaration of Independence because Adams told him to do it. The debates over declaring independence take up an entire 1 1/2 hour segment, but as another history blog notes, the common people and Thomas Paine's Common Sense are both left out.

The fun of the show, for me, is seeing the world of the late 18th century. They've shown Boston, Braintree (where the Adams' farm was located), Philadelphia, and Paris so far. I saw the episode set in Paris a few days before I saw the Fragonard room at the Frick Museum (you can actually tour it online), and I was struck by how the art and the salon world in France both have the same color palette and joie de vivre. It's hard to picture John Adams in a rococo world, but I'll give HBO credit for a clever scene depicting just that.

For more on the series' inaccuracies, check out this HNN piece or browse through the journals of the Continental Congress.

Responses to Obama's speech on race

As promised, here are some responses to Obama's speech. Even those who continue to disagree with Obama's association with Wright concluded that the speech was one of the most important in the past 50 years. I think it's unfortunate that the controversy over Wright is interfering with people's ability to engage the real discussion about race Obama tried to begin: most of the t.v. news reports are so stuck on controversy that they can't move on to conversation.

Here are a few links to check out:

One historian offers a history of a tradition of sometimes inflammatory African American criticism of America through Christianity

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has the inside scoop

Jon Stewart's take and an attempt at dialogue with Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore

NY Times' Nicholas Kristoff: "What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck."

"A part of our union that we have yet to perfect"

Driven by controversy swirling around his former pastor, Barack Obama made a major speech today about race in America. Speaking across the street from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he didn't venerate the men who formed the nation, as many speaking in such a setting would. He spoke of the constitution as a document "ultimately unfinished" and "stained by this nation's original sin of slavery."

It was a striking beginning to a speech that was the most frank, open, and intelligent discussion of race I have ever seen by a politician. Certainly, there was some political pandering in the speech. But he acknowledged what so many politicians fail to: complexity.

Here's the transcript. The video is available there, or with slightly better quality on Youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

I'll post again when the press and historians react in the next few days.

Visit with an eccentric millionaire

If you were a gentleman in the early 20th century who inherited a fortune, what would you do? Perhaps build a castle out of hand-mixed concrete and hand-painted tiles? Or create a museum about early American tools? These were the rather bizarre ways Henry Mercer of Bucks County, PA chose to spend his money and free time.


A few friends and I drove out to Doylestown to see Mercer's house and museum. We were absolutely overwhelmed by how quirky this guy must have been. He started a tileworks and collected tiles from around the world, many of which he built into the walls of the concrete castle he designed and built. There were cuneiform tablets from ancient Iraq embedded into one concrete column and Chinese ceiling tiles from centuries ago overhanging a stairway. There were no hallways, just one strange little room leading to the next.

Along with tiles, Mercer was also obsessed with tools. He had a broad definition of what a "tool" was and had a whole taxonomy of classifying tools. The museum, with 6 stories winding around a massive central atrium, is organized around this system. There are tools for butter churning, tools of transportation--hence the boats and carriages suspended from the rafters--tools for heating, and tools for punishment, to name a few. That last category included a room which you enter only to find yourself underneath a gallows.


In some ways, it's a curator's dream--a collection already organized and catalogued. Mercer kept meticulous records of each of his objects, even (unfortunately) writing the number he assigned the object on the object itself. But more than a museum, the place feels like an attic full of treasures.

Notes on a scandal

With the latest sex scandal--NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement in a prostitution ring--I think I have reached political sex scandal fatigue. Not that such scandals are undeserving of exposition and attention, but I couldn't help but wonder why they seemed to happen so often. I found some possible answers to my question in a NY Times article which historicizes the trend and looks to a variety of scholars for explanations. Here are the possible answers the article presents:
-male politicians become the alpha male and thus think they have a right to sleep with whomever they'd like
-this happened all the time before and we just didn't hear about it as much
-politicians feel entitled, which makes them ignore the consequences of what they do
-politicians are risk takers who think nothing can bring them down
-politicians are thrill-seekers
and my personal favorite
-sex and power both express "this huge energy these people have"

Notice that none of these explanations have anything to do with things changing in our society--these scandals have always gone on. There's such a lengthy history of them that my alma mater George Washington University offered a seminar on the topic, and you have to scroll to get through Wikipedia's list of them (which is pretty incomplete, at least for the early years).

The most acrimonious one in early America was probably the Eaton Affair, in which Washington high society was thrown into tumult over the appointment of a cabinet minister whose wife, Peggy Eaton, was alleged to have been sexually improper. A strange post-script--at nearly 60, Peggy married a 21-year-old painter who then ran off with her money--and her grand-daughter. Let's hope Gov. Spitzer has a better fate.