Not a book

Hey everybody it's Tuesday, which means blog time! But I didn't read a book this time. I'm halfway through one, I guess, but honestly I can barely read anything. Usually comic books are a good break when I get overwhelmed by the combination of life's logistical challenges along with just its good old fashioned emotional challenges, but honestly I haven't even been able to read those lately either.

Here are things that are bothering me (in no particular order): hurricanes, wildfire, DACA, Puerto Rico, white supremacist rallies, and officer-involved shootings. CHIP, subsidized health insurance that saved my family when I was working hard but still couldn't afford insurance, has had its funding expire. Oh, and nuclear war. Then yesterday we experienced the worst mass shooting in recent history and it's so ho-hum that it didn't even seem to take halfway through the news cycle before we were moving on to another rock star who died (and then didn't, and then did). I was wondering, by the way, why everyone points out that this was the worst mass shooting in recent history. As a naturally curious person, I thought, how recent is recent, and how bad have they been before?

Well, buckle up. Like, have you heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre? I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't, since it wasn't included in any history books and was almost completely buried until 1996, the 75th anniversary of the massacre. With eyewitnesses dying of old age, a group called The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was formed to interview survivors, study documents, and hear testimonies from the public. Their report found that "After three and a half years of intensive research, the commission found what had been hinted at for four decades. There had been a pattern of deliberate distortion of facts regarding the riot and even the destruction of vital documents and a subsequent coverup."

The build-up to the "riot" is complicated (generally considered an argument between a black teen boy and a white teen girl in an elevator followed by threats from the community of lynching), but the upshot is that the thriving oil community of Greenwood, often called "Black Wall Street," where hotels, restaurants, and fur stores thrived was burned to the ground by National Guardsmen opening up on the crowd with machine guns, private and police planes dropping balls of turpentine and dynamite. Approximately 300 were killed, 800 were admitted to hospitals, 6,000 black citizens were arrested, and 10,000 black residents were left homeless.

What about the Colfax massacre of 1873? A bunch of crazy election stuff happened that I don't have the time or energy to relate, but the upshot was that Southern Democrats were ticked and tried to take over the parish by force. Republicans recruited black soldiers to defend the place, and the Democrats organized a militia of confederate war veterans and locals called the White League to attack. 60 black soldiers fled into the woods and were shot in the back and thrown in the river. The remaining defenders surrendered in the parish and stacked their guns, but were shot anyway. White soldiers ran down the fleeing men and shot them from horseback, some were hung. It's estimated that up to 150 were killed. In a Supreme Court case in 1876, the case against the insurgents was thrown out and no one was convicted.

There's the Mountain Meadows Massacre, when Mormon settlers, perhaps terrified of American troops threatening the new settlements and after hearing rumors of a party set to attack, dressed as natives and attacked a group of over 100 settlers. When someone in the party recognized the "natives" as white men, the plan to just scare them away turned into a massacre. Every man, woman, and child was killed (sometimes with clubs and knives) except for children deemed to young to remember. These were adopted by Mormon families. The church tried to blame it on nearby Paiutes but eventually pinned the blame on John D. Lee, acting on his own.

Massacres are one thing, the systematic genocide of native tribes from the state of California another. A conservative estimate puts the amount of Native Americans killed just in California by state militias, vigilantes, and federal officers somewhere between 9 and 16,000. In one instance, after native slaves rose up and killed two slave masters, US Infantry and Cavalry troops fired into a village, killing approximately 800 Pomo villagers.

I don't even have a point here, other than this: when you're an inquisitive person who asks a lot of questions you find out quite quickly that some of them have very, very bad answers. Those stories are the tip of the iceberg. Most lists of American single-shooter mass killings start at 1949 with Howard Unruh, a decorated World War II sharpshooter who left his house one morning at 9:20 AM, and shot 13 people dead and wounded two others with a German Luger.

I've been reading a lot about other countries this year. India, South Korea, China, Nigeria, and Cambodia, just to name a few. We're all kind of used to it by now. Every day or two (most times a few times a day) we're hit with a headline that makes our heart sink. 50 killed in an ambush by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Theravada Buddhists. 300,000 dead in Syria with another 135,000 missing. For my whole life when I read these articles, I think, that's terrible, I'm so grateful that I live somewhere safe.

But I don't. We're that country, too. We have massacres and genocides. We have racial unrest. We have sectarian violence where a majority religion oppresses a minority. A white supremacist stabbing two men defending a Muslim woman on a train in Portland. A young man who loved posing with guns and a Confederate flag shooting worshipers in a Black Christian church. Three men who called themselves The Crusaders caught planning to bomb an apartment complex housing 120 people, most of them Somali refugees. We have terrorist attacks from foreign extremists.

And for a relatively young country, we've got a history of atrocities that rivals all but the very worst. We don't have a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, but we do have Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

I don't even know what to say, you guys. This sucks. I don't have any way to wrap it up in a bow that makes us all feel good about the future. This has been a huge blow to Howie's Optimism Club. I seem to rebound, sure. But how much can we put up with? Perusing the headlines today, apparently it's a lot.

ADDENDUM: Rereading this on Wednesday morning, I can see a couple of themes. First of all, as we can see from most of these massacres, the feeling of safety I was talking about has always been a myth. I'm safe because I'm white and a dude and have spent most of my time in middle to lower middle class neighborhoods where the police are our friends and the government was designed to help me succeed. Sometimes these shootings are shocking because they effect people we don't normally associate with getting shot.

Obviously mass shootings make up a tiny fraction of gun deaths in the United States (most of them are suicides). Maybe the most pernicious of human biases is the one that tells us that we're safe because we don't belong to a certain group. We think women who are being abused are married to alcoholics, because that's what movies tell us. We think that rapists hide in dark corners and target women dressed in tube tops. And we think that we're safe from gun crimes because we don't live in housing projects. Until we start seeing ourselves in every person who is suffering in America, instead of thanking God that we aren't at risk, every one of us has something to fear.

I also recognize that there are places less safe than here. Of course there are. This isn't Mexico, it isn't Syria, it isn't Venezuala. In my neighborhood we don't have concrete walls with glass embedded in the tops. There aren't bars in the gas station windows. But I also believe that one of the least effective ways of dealing with problems is to point out that someone else is suffering even more. Everyone deserves to be able to improve their lives. Whatever the current state.

Archie and Reputations

I opened this window, stared at the customary blank white space, and said audibly to myself: "Am I going to write about Archie today?" And I guess the truth is that I am. That's exactly what I'm going to do.

Up until the last few months, I was aware of Archie in the same way that I was aware of Betty Boop. It was painful to look at and served as evidence that there have been vast amounts of time when the entertainment landscape was so dark, so dismal, that these were considered viable forms of entertainment. Like The Munsters, circus peanuts, and savory gelatin dishes, it made me question the generations before me. What could these people possibly have for me, wisdom-wise, when these things are their legacy?

But here's the thing about everything that's going on with Archie books now. It's awesome. Not because Archie was awesome (he wasn't), but because with the right team, comics are like house-flipping shows: you can take a disgusting property and turn it into a pretty nice little bungalow that only smells faintly of cats, and that's only if you knew what to smell for. There's a good chance I lost track of that metaphor before bringing it home.

On the other hand, I see regularly on Facebook that I'm supposed to stop being such a fanboy about Star Wars if I don't like the new stuff that keeps getting released. Like because it says Star Wars on it, it's unpatriotic of me to not be into the boring Force Awakens with Boring Kylo Ren and Pretty Awesome Rey but Really Boring Another Death Star. Here's my take on Star Wars and The Goonies and Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: I liked them when I was a kid and it is relatively public knowledge that kids are not the most objective critics of the media.

When I rewatch them I still like them and it's impossible to separate the good feelings they bring to me from the actual quality of said movies. But they're just movies to me. If the rumored new Bill and Ted movie is good, I will be happy because it's one more thing in this world that enhances my life and makes me smile. If it's bad, it's bad. Lots of things are bad and that's actually good because if I even spend my entire life chasing truly great media it would be impossible. Thank goodness that people make bad things that I can ignore, guilt-free, while I'm also shamed for ignoring Game of Thrones.

I think there are three and a half good Star Wars movies. That's not even that bad of a track record considering that the guy who made them also made Howard the Duck. I wish we could look at every new movie the way we look at every new Star Wars video game. Which is to say there have been more bad ones than good ones but the good ones are very good so maybe this will be one of them? If not, I can treat it like the Raiders' historically miserable Sunday Night Football game: I thank God that my livelihood doesn't depend on the success of those things and move on with my life.

The irony of all of this that I can't shake is that I went to the library today to pick up the new Jughead comic that I'd reserved I also grabbed two Star Wars comics, because even if I am completely ambivalent about the movies, I have loved the new comics unequivocally. The Leia book is amazing, for example. In it, Leia tells Han that the Alliance could use "a hairy beast and his copilot," and when Han tells her Chewie is the copilot, she says, "I know."

That's the first best "I know" said in the Star Wars universe, in my opinion, and that's a tall frickin' order.

And when I looked up the Leia book real quick to remember some stuff about it I saw that it was written by Mark Waid, which is bananas because here I go talking about Archie which was what I planned on doing in the first place before that detour. Mark Waid writes Archie, you see. And boy does he do a good job.

The first book is drawn by Fiona Staples, who is the best, and who you probably recognize from Saga if you pay attention to Saga, which you should (but don't read it on the bus or plane or whatever). Also the spinoffs are amazing. Jughead is drawn by Erica Henderson, who is also the best, and who draws Squirrel Girl, and just got turned over to Ryan North, who writes Squirrel Girl and you guys I have written a lot about how much I love Squirrel Girl.

Here's my point. When I was in junior high I was not well-liked by the masses. I was teased a lot and ignored when I was not being teased. I sort of got my act together by the end of high school and made a lot of friends who would have traditionally been out of my league because by then we didn't care as much about leagues. Except the people I grew up with never really got on board with me being a different person. All they cared about was the kid who picked his nose a lot in elementary school and who was weird in junior high but not the kid who was kind of funny and learning to be kinder. People didn't want to let me change, though. They liked the good old days when everyone knew my place and I didn't somehow manage to go on multiple dates with a cheerleader.

See I set out to write an aggressively non-political post because I was looking through old Facebook stuff and saw that I had friends who would comment and like my stuff years ago who almost certainly have unfollowed me by now and I think that's a huge bummer. But also it's hard not to look at people who are angry that football makes them uncomfortable now that the predominately black player base who have been well-behaved up until now are suddenly showing that they aren't happy and guess what, they never were. Not because they aren't well-compensated, but because even with all of their money they see that their neighborhoods are still terrible and their brothers, sisters, and cousins are still scared for their lives when they get pulled over at night.

When I watch a new Star Wars movie, I mourn a childhood that felt easier, though I know that's just hindsight talking. I don't think about how there was a kid my senior year who grew up with me who would not let me be anything other than the nerd he remembered. Who would roll up balls of clay in pottery class and throw them at me while kids who I thought were my friends sat next to him and laughed. I remember how my confidence would dissolve and I was the same old kid who dreaded going to school and was afraid to walk home when the other kids were so I would play tag with my friends until the streets were clear and I felt safe.

It's not the movies that have changed. It's me. They're still goofy and have good sword fights and bad acting and lots of Muppets. I want to get that feeling back but it's gone, and lightsabers aren't going to bring that back. If you're watching football and it makes you feel bad now, because you don't like thinking that this country isn't fair, it makes sense to lash out and write a rant about just letting people enjoy things, just like you did when your friends rightly asked how the First Order somehow has the budget to make a Starkiller Base when they seem to have no discernible revenue stream. You just want things to be the way they were, even if those things were bad. Because it's always easier that way.

Those good old days are gone in Archie, too. Archie and Betty are best friends and next-door-neighbors who then become the perfect couple until something kind of minor happens but it's big enough that it makes them realize they shouldn't be a couple anymore. What they didn't bank on was that after being a couple they couldn't just go back to being best friends anymore. Especially when Archie starts dating Veronica and Betty starts dating Sayid. They can't even play video games together anymore without getting in trouble with their significant others. Was Sayid in the original comics? It seems unlikely. Anyway, also who cares? Who cares about any of what happened before because these are some of the best writers and artists currently working and they could be writing a Brady Bunch meets The Munsters comic and I'd be reading it. OK come to think of it I would be reading that no matter what.

But wait you guys, though. WAIT. This isn't even all that's going on with Archie! There's also Afterlife With Archie, in which the gang fight a zombie apocalypse! There is The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, about the titular teenage witch and her war with Madam Satan! There is Archie vs. Predator, for goodness sake. I included links to prove that I didn't make any of this up!

There are daily things that are terrifying in this life and world and I write about them regularly. I often delve as deep as I can into the worst of what humanity has to offer and I'll be darned it if isn't nice to stick my head up above the surface of that muck now and again to take a deep fresh breathe of something surprising and fun. So this week it's Archie. Deal with it.

But hey what if you remember really liking something but when you get older you realize that it has some really profound flaws but you think there's enough good there to keep fighting for it but instead of Star Wars it's your country or your church? What would you do to make it better? Hint: whatever it is, if it's not just keeping quiet and being grateful that it exists at all because anything else would potentially make someone uncomfortable, it's wrong. That's what I learned this week and also why I needed something fun and cute to read and write about, you're welcome.

Behold the Dreamers, and Behold, Those Hot Dogs!

Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would be another reminder why the American society as a whole could never call itself highbrow, why its easy availability of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them. - Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue

Before entering the secure and not lucrative world of public service, I spent the first ten years or so of my career working for a private consulting firm. It was a good place to start and I did crazy fun stuff in some pretty amazing places. I worked in Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada (more or less in order of how exciting those locales were). I flew in helicopters and stayed in a fishing lodge once where we were served prime rib and fresh dungeness crab once a week.

A view of a hawk's nest from a helicopter

The hawk baby's view, maybe?

When things were going hot in the American economy, I was hopping and things were looking pretty great. For someone who was willing to try anything, it was as good a place to get a career start as I can imagine. I got my fingers into every plum the environmental permitting world had to offer, skipping through baking hot oil fields, collecting overtime and saying, "what a good boy am I."

Pictured: A good good boy

On one job I would do burrowing owl surveys in the morning, starting around 4:30 AM. Then I'd survey for cactus for 10 hours. Then I'd finish with an evening of burrowing owl surveys. Another job saw me doing owl surveys all night and then a breeding bird survey at sunrise before trying to sleep the day away in a too-hot cabin surrounded by enormous ponderosa pine trees and noisy California quails. 

I accrued enough frequent flyer miles and free hotel visits to take my family to Oregon to visit my sister, and we stayed in the nicest hotels I'd ever seen. I grew up either camping in KOAs or going from Motel 6's to Motel 8's and sleeping on a roll-away bed that was too short for me, and I knew at the time that this gravy train would someday stop, and that my kids would be ruined forever by good hotels and top-notch complimentary breakfasts. But I didn't care.

"Our people say no condition is permanent... Good times must come to an end, just like bad times, whether we want it or not."

That's where I was when the sub-prime crisis hit. And for a while, I weathered it. It almost looked like I'd get through it without a scratch. I graduated with "just" a bachelor's degree and had a job in my field pretty much on day one. A couple of years later, I was helping review resumes for a temporary field tech job that I had been doing while I was still a college student, and was a little humbled by the quality of the candidates. This was for a job that literally consisted of walking back and forth and looking at the ground. The year before we'd been hiring river guides and snowboard instructors and now I was looking at resumes from people with PhD's who had owned their own companies. 

I was looking like a genius and eating crab in Alaska while the folks who went on to grad school when I hit the workforce were trying to get jobs that I'd had when I was a junior in college, and they weren't even getting those. Things were getting a little tighter, sure. It used to be there was always work in the oil fields when my day-to-day office work was getting old, but that dried up. That was fine, though, because the hotels there were gross and wind farms were where the fun work was anyway.

But then the wind farm subsidy went away. And a project we'd won that was supposed to keep us busy for the next ten years dried up. And then things got scary. Like best-friend cats who turn on each other when they can see the bottom of their food bowl, we started getting a little punchy among co-workers. When one's ability to pay their mortgage hinged on whether they were put on a project or not, we became hyper-aware of who was busy and who wasn't, and came up with all sorts of nefarious reasons.

Decision-makers who were overworked would still hoard their projects in fear of finishing too early and working themselves out of a job. Clients started paying very close attention to every line of the contracts and started asking that experienced biologists get pulled because their billing rates were too high, or refused to pay for travel, instead asking that we hire local temporary workers instead of keeping full-time employees busy. 

Full-time employees started resenting temporary employees, and established staff started resenting the new, cheaper folks. There was a bit of we-were-here-first attitude. And also some main-office-employees-should-get-work-before-satellite-offices murmurings (I first wrote "murmurations," but when I looked it up found that it only applies to a flock of starlings, which is awesome). It wasn't the new people's fault that they lived closer to the projects, and they needed work, too. 

At the end I was working about 24 hours every two weeks with a few hours of office work here and there in between and we were going to lose our house. It was really close, you guys. I was sending out 4-5 resumes a week without a single interview. I was super lucky to find a job in time. It certainly didn't get easier overnight, and things are tight still, but also infinitely better.

Last day of work smile

In America today, having documents is not enough. Look at how many people with papers are struggling. Look at how even some Americans are suffering. They were born in this country. They have American passports, and yet they are sleeping on the street, going to bed hungry, losing their jobs and houses every day in this…this economic crisis.

There's a PTSD that sets in after something like this, and a lot of us have it. Not too long ago I sat down with my grandpa while he was interviewed about growing up during the Great Depression. He lived in a boxcar and they were lucky to have it. Like a lot of grandparents of kids of my generation, I would sometimes laugh at him. He had a great job and a wonderful retirement and hasn't had to worry about money for decades, yet he still relentlessly scoured the swap meet for brass antiques, which he would turn around and sell by the pound for a minor profit to a guy who would melt it down.

"If God cuts off your fingers, He will teach you how to eat with your toes."

The Great Recession left me with milder scars. I don't rinse off aluminum foil to reuse it yet. But it messed me up a little. I still don't want to buy a house, because I don't want to have to sell a house. I worry about losing my job. I worry about my wife losing her job. I see coworkers sometimes as trying to undermine me. I worry that I'll be replaced. I blame other people for my problems even when I know that I lost work at my old job because I didn't do good enough work the first time.   

Imagine that on a nationwide scale and you can start to see where some of the political unrest we're dealing with comes from. When there was a lot of work at my consulting job, we loved each other. We loved the revolving cast of seasonal employees we met (except for the gross ones), and there was always more work and hours to go around than people to fill them. I loved mentoring new people and finding them opportunities. There were some paranoid people even then who didn't like to share, but it was pretty apparent how wrong they were. We needed to train up the people who would replace us before we went on to run the world.

I rebounded OK, and even though things are tight and sometimes we have to figure out how to feed a family of five with a combination of leftovers and our last $5. We are still eating. That's not the case for a lot of people. And for whatever reason, whether it's their fault or not, they want to blame someone. It's wrong and it's gross and I hope that we can all accept this while simultaneously recognizing that wrong or not, that blame usually ends up with immigrants.

We love the immigrant story when things are going gangbusters. Anyone not named Mike Pence who can afford to see Hamilton sings gleefully along (hopefully in their heads, because you guys) at the phrase "Immigrants, we get the job done." That's pretty easy. It's tougher to root for someone who has way fewer advantages than you but seems (from the outside) to be doing better. Why should they have a job when I don't, you may find yourself saying. They shouldn't even be here.

It's like being angry that someone is getting that sweet 1.50 hot dog and soda combo at Costco and you know they don't have a membership. There's nothing that makes Americans angrier than someone who looks like they are flaunting the rules and having a great time doing it. We assume the worst, because that's the narrative that makes us feel the best. You see someone parking crappy or speeding by themselves in the carpool lane and you wish you were driving the Condormobile with lasers and rear-mounted flamethrowers. When you or I park crappy or speed, it's always, always for a good reason though.

Here's the thing about all of that stuff: I've never seen Costco run out of hot dogs. And there are almost always more parking spots. I was near apoplectic when I found out that I couldn't get an SNES Classic preorder because scalpers were using a bot. I couldn't believe the unfairness. They weren't following the rules and were getting rewarded for it. But when I got an email a little later saying that a few more preorders opened up and I managed to snag one, suddenly I was pretty zen about it. Like, I was still mad because other folks weren't getting one and my heart hurt for them, but I wasn't that sad.

Even when they are following the rules, sometimes we find reasons for resentment. In Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers, Jende is a Cameroonian immigrant trying to get a green card via asylum laws. He's in New York legally with a work visa, but it's set to expire. He works as a cab driver while sharing an apartment with four other immigrants until he saves enough money for a tiny, cockroach ridden apartment and can bring his wife and child over, his wife on a student visa. In other words, they've done everything right so far. But this American Dream is like the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's very aesthetically pleasing, but look at the bones.

Jende gets a job as a driver for the family of a big time Wall Street executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende is making four times what he was as a cab driver, and the work is easy. Pleasant, even. The Edwards live in a perfect penthouse apartment and have a mansion in the Hamptons. As first Jende and then his wife Neni get to know the family, they see cracks in the perfect facade. They begin to see how precarious their livelihood is, and how the whims of these rich white people who they love but also fear can mean an end to their American Dream.

The year is 2008. There are bad days on the horizon for Wall Street executives and their drivers.

My advice to someone like you is to always stay close to the gray area and keep yourself and your family safe. Stay away from any place where you can run into police-that's the advice I give to you and to all young black men in this country. The police is for the protection of white people, my brother. Maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men. Never black men. Black men and police are palm oil and water. You understand me, eh.

Like Jende and Neni, Mbue is from Limbe, Cameroon. There visitors are welcomed with a sign that says, "Welcome to Limbe Municipality, the Town of Friendship." In New York City, the message is mixed. Today, immigrants are an easy scapegoat for unemployment in the United States, but we also hear that in two California counties, $13 million worth of crops rotted in fields due to a labor shortage. Even when farmers offered salaries above minimum wage and a 401k plan, Americans weren't willing to do the job that migrant workers did before immigration crackdowns made it too difficult. In my own work, we're facing abnormally high prices for habitat restoration work for the same reason. Costco is not running out of hot dogs, you guys. We just don't like hot dogs enough.

I don't know if that metaphor works but man, those hot dogs are too big for one person to eat. That's my main point.

People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?