In the Shadow of the Banyan and Lit Snobbery

I heard noises outside, the hums and drones of night creatures. An owl hooted, and another answered, telling each other an endless tale amidst an endless banging of hoes and shovels, the earth being smashed. When you hear an owl, so they say, death is nearby. But owls were always hooting in Democratic Kampuchea, and when someone died, they went as quiet as people, afraid to speak up, to cry out loud. I had learned not to be afraid of owls or other night creatures. Animals are not like people. If you leave them alone, they won't hurt you. But people will, even if you've done no wrong. They hurt you with their guns, their words, their lies and broken promises, their sorrow. - Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan

Holy smokes this post is off to a bad start. First of all there were maybe five paragraphs of me being very snooty about the different kinds of book readers there are, which may have had decent jokes in them, but is not the kind of humor that I want my blog to be about or for me to be about in general. Then I tried to embed a Facebook post that has resulted in the HTML being all messed up on this thing which makes me think that maybe I should have stuck with that multimedia major that I had for the first semester I took in college.

That's weird to think about, that I was going to school briefly to be a web designer. If I'd done that I probably never would have taken a literature class, which means I wouldn't have learned how to read more deeply, and this blog wouldn't exist maybe. Or maybe it would but it would be about something that's actually useful like, "did you try to embed some code into your blogger post and now it's all mucked up? Well you've come to the right place and that right place is Howie's Kode Klub featuring Scorpion From Mortal Kombat So That's Why The K's."

I also bet that I wouldn't have been introduced to nature writing and in turn introduced to environmentalism and in turn introduced to the art of going camping for work. That all sounds like bad stuff but also maybe I'm rich in this scenario? I'm honestly not sure. Do I know any rich web designers?

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that instead of Howie's Kode Klub (featuring Scorpion of Mortal Kombat who says, "'Get Over Here,' and Enjoy This Quality Kontent" in the masthead for a while until I'm sued) it's Howie's Book Club. And instead of providing valuable advice to web designers instead it's providing no advice to nobody. But hey, at least it looks unprofessional.

I've often said that I quit my creative writing degree program because it was making me hate two of the things that I held most dear, reading and writing. Unfortunately, it wasn't making me love 'rithmatic either so I was in a pretty dark place. I think in retrospect this is partially true. I started to hate writing because of the bizarre standard writing was held to in a college literature class. And I started to hate reading because the list of great writers and works was tiny and narrow. It really messed me up. It took me years before I could read for fun again, and even then there was a tiny voice wearing patches on its sport jacket that would constantly question my reading choices.

That's kind of what this post started out being about, but then it veered into some weird territory where I made fun of bookstore nerds, who I said "fetishize buying books over reading them, and when they might accidentally trip and fall onto a book and actually read it they spend all of their remaining time on message boards talking about their 'book crush' and how casting totally messed up because the guy/girl they cast is just so wrong for the part, probably because they had to cast a real human being."

I'm glad I didn't make fun of bookstore nerds. Like I said before, it's not what I'm about, and it's not what this blog is about. It's not up to me to decide what books should be read or written or what unhealthy relationship is being portrayed as romantic (more about this next week), or how little I care about the conflicted half-elf who spends half of his time loving both a human woman and an elf woman at the other half in a tavern. All I want to do here is talk to you about the book I read and also about what a mess I am sometimes and eventually get very very famous. That's it.

I want a very specific kind of fame, though, which is the kind where people only say good things always and nobody ever looks up my address and sends me bombs. Luckily I'm not a woman saying highly controversial things like, "maybe in video games the goal sometimes shouldn't be torturing women." If you don't like what I say in these posts, maybe don't send me bombs? Thanks.

Huh, after reading that post I don't think I want to be famous after all. Just rich. I just want to be so rich because of my blog but also not famous at all. I just need one very wealthy person to read it and then send me a check for ten million dollars. PayPal works, too.

Anyway, here's the thing about books that I learned and kind of had to unlearn when I was an English major, which is what this part of the post is supposed to be about before it became about becoming rich and not famous: books can and should be about important things. 

The thing I wanted to embed in my post but could not was this. Since I can't embed it, you're going to have to go look at it which I know is a hassle but it could be worse: you could be starving to death in a Cambodian death camp (this applies to a lot of situations). If you didn't click on it even though I asked you to do so pretty nicely, it's a series of parody book covers, many of which are the kinds of books I read in college classes. I can add a couple to the canon, including The Universe Doesn't Care About You So You Might As Well Do Whatever You Want, Two Hundred Pages of Descriptions of Fly Fishing. And my personal favorite, This is Basically A Summary of a Textbook About an Eastern Religion that I Read Once in College and Wedged Between Very Sparse Narrative.

As far as I can tell these are all books for people who are above the petty squabbles of day-to-day life and prefer instead to read a story in which nothing happens to terrible people as they drive across the country and do drugs and say things like "transcendent" in reference to like a hot dog. I don't get into politics, man. It's like, I'm more interested in the universe. They say this because they're still on their parents' health insurance or don't have some genetic disposition towards disease so they don't have to think about it much. Or because they aren't more likely to get prison sentences for the same crime that a white person would get like a medal for, just because of their skin color. Or maybe they don't live in a country in which having the kind of education that lets you spend all of your time reading about university professors who have affairs with their students and learn a little something about existence on the way would lead to a death sentence.

"Raami's story is, in essence, my own. I was five years old when on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge stormed into Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh, and declared a new government, a new way of life." That's what we read in the afterword of Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan. I'm not going to try to summarize the revolution and subsequent genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but this article does a decent job of it. The upshot is that in a country with a population of approximately 7 million, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million were murdered by a Communist regime bent on restarting civilization. That's 21 percent of the population.

No one saw through the coded rhetoric of solidarity and brotherly love to a deeply indoctrinated belief that anyone could be the enemy. At first the enemy was the intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, pilots and engineers, policemen and military officers, those of rank and reputation. Then the enemy was the office clerks, technicians, palace servants, taxi drivers, people with mok robar civilai--"modern professions"--which would include almost everyone at the temple, as the majority of us were from the city. those who didn't lie and assume a new identity were called and brought out into the open, like rabbits forced from their holes.

In the Shadow of the Banyan doesn't try to summarize what happened, either. In fact, Pol Pot is never named. Instead, every nefarious deed, every murder, every bit of torture, is perpetrated by The Organization. Young Raami, limping because of polio as a young child, has her brace taken and thrown away. "The Organization will cure you," she is told.

Raami is a princess, though by the time she's 7, royalty in Cambodia doesn't mean much other than general respect and never having to worry about money. She lives a very comfortable life in Phnom Penh, where she is loved by her poet father, doting mother, and multiple servants. The revolution outside of the compound gates is an annoyance, but doesn't effect anyone in the family personally until one day a servant goes missing.

Things go downhill from there.

The family is uprooted from their life in the city and resettled in a small village. The Organization has declared all city life to be immoral, and point to the lives of rural rice farmers as the only way to live. The intent was to return to a purer society untainted by Buddhism and imperialism. Which, let's be honest, that sounds kind of nice. Everyone working with their hands, sweat of their brow, all of that. In fact, Raami kind of likes the life when she settles into it. There is satisfaction in farming and floating the rice patties, catching fish and crawdads.

But let's also be real. While Raami lives the peasant life with a very grandparenty couple, what's really happening is a transfer of power and wealth. People unhappy with who is rich and powerful overthrow the rich and powerful and whoops I guess they're the ones with all of the resources now. Funny how it works out that way. It's almost like being rich isn't the immoral thing, it's the fact that the rich are not you that really gets stuck in your craw.

Things get worse, as these things often do. There are work camps and family members taken in the middle of the night. There are executions and torture. There is unspeakable evil and unbelievable kindness. All of these we see through the gradually eroding innocence of a young girl who walks with a limp and makes mistakes sometimes. Mistakes that have profound consequences, but you guys, she's just this tiny sweet little girl and nobody should be put in these kinds of situations. We watch as her father sacrifices himself for the family. We see the decisions her mother makes to keep her children alive.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating. 1984 is a good book, but also I think it's pretty much useless. It purports a scary, alternative future in which things that have happened in real life all over the world happen to white, Western people instead. Can you imagine the horrors? Or like how scary is it to imagine that the things that systematically happened to black women for hundreds of years in the United States suddenly happened to adorable blue-eyed Elizabeth Moss?

What if instead we read the story of a woman who lived through the real-life horrors of a radical Communist uprising in Cambodia? Big Brother isn't staring at you through the TV, but your neighbors are watching your every move. Especially the children. Let's say the wife of one of the town's leaders thinks you're too pretty, that the leader's eyes linger on her too long. Turns out that you went to university (whether you did or not), which means you have no place in this brave new world. Let's say you wear glasses, or "look Vietnamese." You could be sent to S-21, a prison that held up to 14,000 people, 12 of whom survived.

Clap along with me: The. Reason. This. Is. Scarier. Is. Because. It. Really. Happened.

Instead of saying, "this is just like 1984," when a hypothetical President of The United States questions a judge because of his race, or pushes for torture of political prisoners, or mocks war heroes, or builds the least-educated cabinet in 24 years or fabricates lies whole cloth in order to stir up anger against a certain ethnic group or leads a group of teenage kids in a chant of his name for no reason other than to prop up his pathetic ego when the news makes him sad, say "this is just like the countless other charismatic leaders who slowly eroded the very fabric of a nation that was built to protect us against someone just like him."

Heck, it's happening right now in Poland. It's happening in Turkey. Nations previously considered free and democratic turn authoritarian all the time. Vladimir Putin faked a terrorist attack in order to seize power. And he murders his political opponents. That all happened in my lifetime. It happened after I graduated from high school. He's neat now, though. A real leader.

This gets packaged up in different ideologies. Whether it's communists claiming to fight for the workers against the rich who secretly pull the levers, or a good old-fashioned manipulation of the downtrodden to blame their fellow man who looks or talks a little different; a bunch of rich old guys who can't stand to see a kid get lunch for free. What it all boils down to is too much power in the hands of someone with too few morals and a bunch of uneducated young kids with guns in their hands and a higher purpose in mind to do their bidding.

"They're not the same men you studied philosophy and history with in France... Nor are they people whose daily struggles and aspirations you've tried to capture and convey in your poetry. They are children who've been given guns--power beyond their years."

In the wake of this godawful tragedy, when almost a quarter of a nation was murdered because of things like wearing glasses or knowing French, the United States took in about 150,000 refugees. Kids who had starved nearly to death, mothers (mostly mothers because men were more likely to be murdered), rape victims, torture victims. They've had a tough time. Because everyone with an education or skill applicable to life in an industrialized nation was murdered, they integrated slower than other groups. Because they had PTSD, they sometimes had behavioral problems. Their rate of poverty is higher than other ethnic groups, and the crime rate is higher. The US has started sending them back. Sure, you say, if someone flees their country and commits a crime, they should go back. But c'mon. 47% of the Cambodian and Laotian (communism again) people deported under Obama had nothing worse than a traffic violation on their record.

It's worse now, because of course it is. A refugee who came to the United States at the age of 8, who was arrested and served time at 14 for gang related violence, but who has spent the rest of his life with a clean record as a barber, is slated to be sent to a country he barely remembers. Thanks a lot, Bill Clinton, way to "strike a mighty blow against terrorism." If traffic violations are terrorist acts now, we should fill Guantanamo with all of the people who speed on my street (no really, let's do this.)

Vaddey Ratner came to the United States at 11. She lived in a Minnesota low-income housing project knowing no English. In 1991, she graduated as class valedictorian. We're lucky to have her. There was a lot of fear of communism in the 70s and 80s, that somehow the people fleeing Cambodia would bring the very same kind of philosophy that ruined their lives here is laughable. Right? It's almost like amazing people come from all over the world and there isn't really anything holy or special about being born within imaginary lines on woefully distorted wall maps.

Anyway, In the Shadow of the Banyan is like a national treasure. We should be honored to have it available to us, and you guys should read it. All of this political stuff is my own reaction to it, none of it is in the book. The book is just an amazing story of survival and if you want to read it like that, that works, too. I'm no literature professor. Thank heavens.

The Round House and Coincidences

They lived and died too quickly in those years that surrounded the making of the reservation, died before they could be recorded and in such painful numbers that it was hard to remember them all without uttering, as my father did sometimes as he read local history, and the white man appeared and drove them down into the earth, which sounded like an Old Testament prophecy but was just an observation of the truth. And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications. - Louise Erdrich, The Round House

Life is full of some weird stuff. There's a part of me that wanted to use the S word in that first sentence because it's reminiscent of the way a lot of people talk and write and it felt right, but part of me also wonders if writing something because it "feels right," is really just writing something you've heard so many times that it actually has no meaning. Like when people still quote Austin Powers, or tell me that I'm a valuable member of the human race who deserves to occupy space.

Take this set of circumstances, for example: one day at the local library they were having a promotion where they hid book jackets wrapped around a placeholder box. You'd search the library for one of these ersatz tomes and if you found one, you got the book for free. I found LaRose, by Louise Erdrich. I was very pleased by this because if you remember, I loved the last book of hers that I'd read. Just couldn't get enough of it.

Now, there are pretty much only two ways you can trick me into never reading a book. The first is to put a dragon on the cover. Second and only slightly less effective is to place said book in my ownership. See, my nightstand always has at least four full-sized library books in a stack, and those books cry out to me like so many kitties on a Saturday morning when their owners have the temerity to sleep in even an extra five minutes JUST FOR ONE LOUSY MORNING. Each book comes equipped with a burning fuse, like the bomb that is always awaiting Inspector Gadget as he finally, finally turns around Dr. Claw's chair, each marking the passing moments of my life in which their particular date becomes due.

When I return library books, it's with the relief of a man who just made his final payment to the loan shark with the tall collector and the short collector. The short one is quiet, too quiet, but moves with the precision of a leopard. The tall one jokes around and smiles a lot, but you can see that his knuckles are always swollen -- the skin broken so many times as to become an abstract portrait of pain -- and the smile never quite makes it to his eyes. Not today, tall one and short one, I say as the books are consumed by the conveyor belt that always eats but is never satiated. Not ever.

Books I own inspire no such anxiety. They are content only to know that I am nearby. They wait for me like Blue the Dog and Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper and their baby Paprika and Side Table Drawer and The Mailbox wait for Steve to return, though we all know Steve is dead. Yea, that man is dead as S word.

The upshot is I hadn't read it yet. Good thing, actually!

Picture it: it's last week, and I've got this trip coming up, one in which I would be traveling by aeroplane to the distant and exotic riverbanks of Bend, Oregon. I already have a library book on hand, but I need a back up. Space is at a premium and I don't want to haul around two books, so I look through the library's digital offerings. Nothing on my to-read list is available, but I do see a little number called The Round House by one Louise Erdrich. Excelsior, I say audibly, not knowing what that means. And then I go through the roughly 18-step process required to check it out.

I won't belabor this any further (only because that would be impossible), but it turns out that all three of the books that I've mentioned make up a loose trilogy. I had no idea! I was maybe 30 pages into The Round House when they mention a lynching in which a 13-year-old Ojibwe (Chippewa) boy was hung. Wait a second, that's totally what The Plague of Doves was about! And so it was. Here we meet another 13-year-old boy, but now it's some 20 years later, and the boy is Joe.

Like The Plague of Doves, The Round House starts with a horrible tragedy. And like that tragedy, the roots of it can be traced back generations. Some of it can be traced back to the very beginning of what is now called the United States of America.

Land speculation is the stock market of the times. Everybody’s in on it. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. As well as Chief Justice John Marshall, who wrote the decision for this case and made his family’s fortune. The land madness is unmanageable by the nascent government. Speculators are acquiring rights on treaty-held Indian land and on land still owned and occupied by Indians—white people are literally betting on smallpox.

Joe's mother is brutally attacked, and their family's stable and loving life is shattered. His father, Bazil, is a judge in the town, and understands the complexity of the law. The attack happened near the round house, an old place where Ojibwe secretly worshiped when worshiping in their way was against the law.

During the old days when Indians could not practice their religion—well, actually not such old days: pre-1978—the round house had been used for ceremonies. People pretended it was a social dance hall or brought their Bibles for gatherings. In those days the headlights of the priest’s car coming down the long road glared in the southern window. By the time the priest or the BIA superintendent arrived, the water drums and eagle feathers and the medicine bags and birchbark scrolls and sacred pipes were in a couple of motorboats halfway across the lake. The Bible was out and people were reading aloud from Ecclesiastes. Why that part of the Bible? I’d once asked Mooshum. Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.

The round house, it turns out, is a mess of land ownership. Some owned by the reservation, some by the state, some Federal. Each piece carries with it its own complications. See, up until 2015, tribes could not prosecute non-members of the tribe in cases of rape and domestic abuse. That might sound like some weird loophole that probably doesn't apply in many cases, but no.

There are epidemic levels of domestic violence on tribal lands. Three out of five Native women have been assaulted in their lifetimes, and 34 percent will be raped, according to the National Congress of American Indians. Getting to the heart of the VAWA provision, 59 percent of assaults against Native women take place at or near a private residence, and, as of 2010, 59 percent of Native women were married to non-Native men. 

On some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

So let's review. The majority of rape and domestic violence cases against Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men. But tribal police have no jurisdiction over non-Native anybody, even if the crime was committed on tribal land. What happens then? Well, the case gets handed to Federal officers. Except according to a Government Accountability Report, U.S. attorneys declined 67% of sexual assault cases over a period of five years.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed in 1994, and has been passed easily every year since except for two occasions: the first was in 2011, when Republicans let it expire because of language protecting undocumented immigrants, LGBT, and Native Americans. Again, in 2013, Joe Biden tried to get the Native American loophole closed, and again Republicans fought the measure, specifically because of the Native jurisdiction issue. It only passed in 2015 when Democrats had a majority. Now, of course, the act is facing defunding, because it doesn't have a gun attached to it.

We starved while the cows of settlers lived fat off the fenced grass of our old hunting grounds. In those first years our white father with the big belly ate ten ducks for dinner and didn’t even send us the feet.

Put yourself back in 1988 now, and you're the son of two very well educated parents. You live in a nice house and there is always food on the table. Your dad is the frickin' judge. And your mom will not leave her room for fear of being re-victimized. Everyone knows who did it, but he walks free because we have a legal system based on centuries of racist precedent. You can run into the man at the grocery store and he'll grin at you.

If you're Joe you want your mom back. And so Joe decides to do something about it.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.

But this is a book by Louise Erdrich, and so like a Coen brothers movie, there will not be a single wasted character. Joe's friend Cappy, charismatic and loyal. The town priest, and ex-marine not afraid to run down a kid in town straight out of the confessional if he's mad enough. Mooshum, Joe's ancient grandfather who tells legends in his sleep. And Linda, famous for her banana bread, abandoned by her white mother as a twin when it was revealed that she'd probably be mentally disabled. Secretly nursed to health by a Native nurse and then adopted.

While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.

Nobody does this like Erdrich does. She weaves together these families and these generations deftly. Nothing happens without the seeds of that thing being planted centuries before. Dreams come true. That visions are real and ghosts exist is taken for granted. Not even a game of Bionic Commando is without deep meaning.

For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando.

 This just in, Bionic Commando references get you an extra star. Six stars, this book.

Capcom

So says Nathan "Rad" Spencer, so says us all

I Will Send Rain and The Potato Metaphor

We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone andd started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in. - Rae Meadows, I Will Send Rain

Well. There are a lot of directions I can take this thing. Let's start with this article. 

In the 1910s and 1920s, another land boom spread across the Plains, luring a new generation of farmers unaware of the previous century’s drought disaster. Tractors that could rip through thick native grasslands replaced the old plows. Bullish news stories on generous rainfall, war-inflated wheat prices and farm subsidies helped bring tens of thousands of settlers. When wheat prices collapsed, farmers with large mortgage payments responded by tearing up even more of the grasses that had evolved over thousands of years to hold the Earth together in dry times. Early ecologists warned of the need for a conservation ethic. Most farmers never heard those warnings. Those who heard them did not believe. 

The next great drought settled in around 1930 and seared for a decade. Summer temperatures passed 115 degrees. Thousands died from the extreme heat. When hot prairie winds met stripped ground, they kicked up violent black dust storms. These storms really did follow the plow. Rather than rain, they carried millions of pounds of dirt. After riding out blinding blizzards in Oklahoma on Black Sunday in 1935, AP reporter Robert Geiger dubbed the region “the Dust Bowl.” In response, writes environmental historian Donald Worster, chambers of commerce formed “truth squads” that worked systematically “to deny, and to repress, the Dust Bowl label.” But the winds would not be censored. They blew five more years of dust and death.

The main point of the article is that for as long as there have been businesses, American business interests have been telling us that that thing that science says is killing us really isn't that bad. Take, for example, the gasoline and paint industry.

On October 26, 1924, the first of five workers who would die in quick succession at Standard Oil’s Bayway TEL works perished, after wrenching fits of violent insanity; thirty-five other workers would experience tremors, hallucinations, severe palsies and other serious neurological symptoms of organic lead poisoning. In total, more than 80 percent of the Bayway staff would die or suffer severe poisoning. News of these deaths was the first that many Americans heard of leaded gasoline–although it would take a few days, as the New York City papers and wire services rushed to cover a mysterious industrial disaster that Standard stonewalled and GM declined to delve into.

Seriously, read that article. It's long, but interesting. It says that industry actively fought to cover up the impacts of lead gasoline and paint on public health, with the help of the United States Surgeon General and a series of tactics to obfuscate science that are still used today. The upshot is that in spite of the Bayway deaths in 1924, the United States didn't start phasing out leaded gasoline until 1975, and tanks still offered "leaded" as an option until 1986. A lot of us remember pretty clearly as kids seeing it as an option. A CDC study showed that blood-lead levels declined from 1978 to 1991 by 78%.

The amount of deaths caused by this intentional cover-up are essentially incalculable, but in just under 10 years, street soil already found a massive increase in lead.

In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.

It took another 50 years after that study before lead was banned, and the number of drivers in the US increased exponentially. Some estimates say that there is enough accumulated lead in our soils to account for 68 million cases of toxic levels of lead in children, and an annual 5,000 adult deaths of lead-induced heart disease.

The men who got rich off of leaded gasoline in the US are dead now, and they couldn't take their billions of dollars in blood money with them, but every day people die because of their greed and corruption. The politicians who manipulated the message in order to get more campaign contributions are dead, too. But we still live with the results. There is a compelling correlation between lead levels and violent crime that suggests that the steady drop in crime the United States has experienced since the late '70s is the result of the phasing out of leaded gasoline.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

We hear a lot about Flint, where city officials knew there was a problem but did nothing about it. Or there's Maryland's secretary of housing, community and development, who:

dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callously suggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

Hey Howie? It looks like so far you're just filling out a blog post with quotations and very few of your own words in between. Did this work for you in college?

I don't know. Maybe? I want to keep making this case, though. We're still using lead in bullets, which is messing up birds, including bald eagles, but hunters are fighting to overturn an Obama directive to stop it. Also, let's not forget the rest of the world. "While Americans cruise their freeways burning exclusively unleaded gasoline, as of 1996, 93 percent of all gasoline sold in Africa contained lead, 94 percent in the Middle East, 30 percent in Asia and 35 percent in Latin America."

According to the World Bank, 1.7 billion urbanites in developing nations are in danger of lead poisoning, including neurological damage, high blood pressure and heart disease from airborne lead, 90 percent of which is attributable to leaded gasoline. Excessive exposure to lead causes 200,000-500,000 cases of hypertension in the Third World, with 400 deaths per year attributable to lead exposure in the late eighties. In Mexico City, one of the world’s most polluted (and populous) cities, 4 million cars pump an estimated 32 tons of lead each day into the air. In Jakarta, one and a half tons enters the atmosphere every twenty-four hours. A research scientist with the Canadian National Water Research Institute performed roadside-dust analyses in Nigeria that revealed as much as 6,000 parts per million of lead. In the United States, lead dust is considered hazardous to children at 600 ppm.

I was in a conversation (argument ((fight)) once about climate change in which I was told that God would not let us ruin the Earth to the point of it becoming uninhabitable. This was news to me. The God I was raised to believe is in fact kind of famous for letting us make mistakes and then live with the consequences. That's kind of His whole deal. I can definitely ruin my backyard, as my next-door neighbors have so aptly pointed out. A city can ruin a park, a state can overgraze to the point of complete ecosystem conversion, and an entire region can tear up the grass that keeps soil in place and create a 300,000 ton dust storm, so dense that farmers put ropes between their houses and their outhouses in case they needed to venture out in a cloud of dirt so dense they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces. All because the phrase "the rain follows the plow," was just so dang catchy.

To those who possess the divine faculty of hope—the optimists of our times—it will always be a source of pleasure to understand that the Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth, but, on the contrary, has so endowed it that man, by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas. 

That's the scenario one finds oneself transported to when reading Rae Meadows' I Will Send Rain. We meet the Bell family in 1934 Mulehead, Oklahoma. There's Annie and Samuel, the parents, and their two kids: teenage daughter Birdie and young Fred, who is like 8 or something? I can't remember. I'll be honest, the family is the least interesting thing about the book.

“Stay calm,” the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.” 

Like, I feel like I've read this story one million times now. Annie is middle-aged and pretty but sad, and has a crush on the mayor. Birdie is 15 and has a crush on a boy. Fred is very smart and sweet but has bad lungs (guess what that doesn't go well with dust storms). Samuel starts having dreams that he thinks may be visions from God. Everything that you think is going to happen eventually happens. For some reason we're supposed to interpret Birdie's young love as naive and irrational, but Annie's adult fascination with the city mayor with his nice shoes as a very serious awakening of super great self-discovery. This is how people behave in literature, the author says. I know because I've read a lot of it.

As the darkness grew, and with Samuel gone, Annie thought she’d join her children upstairs, but she stopped outside the door when she heard Birdie mention Cy’s name. Since he’d left, Birdie spoke to her in short angry sentences, as if Cy’s leaving were Annie’s fault. She wished she could hold her and say she understood. She had more in common with Birdie than she could admit. But she knew how trying to talk to her would go. They were each spinning in the dark, like flies in a glass of water, flapping around for something to latch onto.

See, that's good prose. Meadows is a very good writer. The setting is especially evocative. I just would have loved to be surprised even once. There are side characters who I loved, and moments that were beautiful:

Pastor Hardy’s wife had been the organist back in Arkansas, and he missed her acutely whenever Mrs. Turner—her small spidery hands—would play the opening chords of “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” or “Abide with Me.” A warmth would travel up his spine and then fly off, leaving him more lonesome than ever. In front of his flock, he sometimes could feel the abyss of despair open beneath him. He feared these moments and felt the hand of the devil in them.

These people have faith, and struggle with God and His apparent abandonment of hard-working people. They waste their money on snake oil salesmen who shoot dynamite into the clouds. They get the band together and dispense lemonade while rounding up and clubbing jackrabbits to death. There is so much meat here, and yet it feels like the book wants to spend all of its time describing the mashed potatoes. Like, I've had mashed potatoes. They're fine. But if you're going to focus on them, they better be frickin life changing. Instead they're from a Pinterest recipe already shared by Kate Chopin and Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor and Henry James. They are, in short, just potatoes.

That dang dust bowl, though. We just don't learn, do we? Nowadays just 90 companies account for 63% of air pollution. And half of that took place after 1988, when NASA testified to congress that climate change was no longer theoretical. And yet we're the only developed country to actively withdraw from a cooperative agreement to reduce its effects. I wonder what percentage of campaign donations those 90 companies account for? If only there were some way of finding out...

I'm not pretending that these companies don't provide jobs and livelihoods to a lot of people. Nor am I saying that I don't use the products they create. We're all sharing the blame on this thing, just like in the end the farmers' lands were coated and crops were choked by the same dust they ultimately sent into the air due to their farming practices. But there's a big difference between me filling up my very fuel efficient car with the only fuel source available to me, and an industry actively manipulating the market and the policy-makers who supposedly represent us and calling it freedom.

We've had those potatoes before, too, you guys. Those are what we call dumpster potatoes. They have lead and mercury in them and Big Potato is calling it a superfood. Wow this potato metaphor really went places.