≡≡≡≡  my sources for this post appear at the end of the post.  ≡≡≡≡

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

In George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, the pigs, which have served as advocates for all the farm animals — striving to better their conditions and oppose the practices and world-view of the humans — gradually adopt that world-view and those practices, and begin to resemble their oppressors.

Animal Farm ends with a disturbing image: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I remember how reading those lines gave me a cold chill. I experienced the same feeling watching a documentary recently.

A man and a woman, clothed in white aprons, stand in the midst of a large, clean, shadowless industrial building. In the background and all around them are overhead tracks, on which empty hooks swing with the conveyor-belt motion of the tracks. The man and woman stand passively, not interacting though they face one another only a few feet apart beneath the tracks. Eventually, plucked chickens begin to appear on the hooks, far distant. The chickens swing closer and closer, until finally they reach the respective stations of the man and woman. Mechanically, the human workers raise their knives and hands, grasp each chicken as it swings by, and perform the necessary eviscerating or severing task on each, release it, and address the next.

Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread) offers this scene without commentary. It’s an Austrian film released late in 2005. Comprised solely of vignettes, it contains no scripted dialogue or voiceover, only images. (Rarely, people are heard talking in the background, but the words are either inaudible or unimportant.)

“The viewer outside looks from machine to man, and from man to machine, and from machine to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I mentioned to someone that I was impressed with this film and that it had caused me to re-think the food sold in our markets. She asked, “Was it really gross?” meaning, “Were the conditions disgusting in those processing plants?” I told her that part of the shock came from the images of clean, glossy industrial processing of food — not what you’d think of when you imagine food production.

Dehumanizing humans and de-animalizing animals

Unser Täglisch Brot powerfully shows how mechanization and corporatization in the creation and processing of our food affects both its producers and the food itself.

What is it to be human? Considering that around eight hours a day is given to our work, what is an acceptable quality of life during so large a part of our day? Who is really living?

Our system of creating and processing food dehumanizes us.

In the documentary, machines are filmed with people operating them. The people seem to be extensions of the machines, fitting into the machines, like parts. Unser Täglisch Brot is bookended by shots showing workers, anonymous in full protective suits, face masks, and boots, spraying down and sanitizing meat-processing plants: person in service to machine.

The animals move toward these stationary people — the people do not move. Even cows waiting to be milked are placed into tubular racks on a conveyor belt, moving toward a waiting person who cleans their teats and attaches the milking machine as the cows pass by.

One grotesque sequence shows the killing of cows for slaughter. Working alone, a man loads a cow into a circular chamber resembling an MRI machine. After pushing the cow in from the rear and closing the machine, the worker walks to the front of the machine. As the cow struggles, the worker shoots it in the forehead. Intstantly, the animal drops. The chamber begins rotating upside-down with the cow twitching inside. The worker circles again to the rear of the machine and pulls from an overhead track a piece of equipment that he loops around the inverted bovine’s rear legs. With the push of a button, the animal — not twitching now — is dragged from the chamber, is conveyed, suspended, head and forelegs dangling, out of sight down the overhead track. The worker has loaded the next animal into the chamber before the first is out of the video frame.

Perhaps the most chilling vignettes of all are those showing human beings during their breaks. Time after time, we see workers sitting alone, staring into space, not interacting. Even one scene filming eight workers together in a lunchroom reveals one talking nonstop, with the others silent, not engaged, not relating to one another, and only occasionally glancing at the incessant speaker. The passive, silent chewing of sandwiches and smoking of cigarettes underscores the notion that the workers’ physical needs are being met in the same way that the machines are lubricated and washed down: in order to sustain their functionality in the system.

In two brief sequences, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, the director of Unser Täglisch Brot, offers a contast to the dehumanizing view of mechanized food production. Two men who work together mining what looks like salt, and two men who harvest nuts together, are filmed during their lunch break, chatting and laughing. The natural settings — deep inside the earth, in a nut orchard — and the notion of teamwork — in each case, one worker is essential to the success of the other  — serve to mitigate the tendency of mechanized food production to reduce people to the level of cogs in a machine. In both the nut harvesting and the salt mining, machines are clearly necessary; but dehumanization does not follow as a necessary consequence.

Can animals be animals?

Not only does mechanization and corporatization of the food supply system dehumanize workers, it also de-animalizes the animals — and even “de-plants” the plants. In Unser Täglisch Brot, cows and pigs are fertilized by artificial insemination; they never contact animals of the opposite gender. Cows are fed by moving vehicles fitted out with chutes spraying feed into their pens. They don’t feed at troughs or bins, but scavenge on the floor among the excrement and bedding material for their food. Even the birthing process is de-animalized, with calves delivered by c-section.

One scene opens with a man in a white lab coat rolling a tall, gleaming enclosed rack into a brightly lit room neatly lined with such racks. The room looks like it houses a supercomputer or something similarly high-tech. Then the man opens the door of the rack and reveals drawer after drawer of baby chicks. Even knowing that I was watching a film about food production, this image startled me. The chicks, a stereotypical emblem of yellow cartoon cuteness, bear no relation to their environment. Presumably, research has determined the correct ratio of maximum efficiency to minimum “collateral damage” — disease or loss of product.

The “de-planting” of plants is shown in vignettes of vast fields, monocultures of grain, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes. In one affecting scene, acres of sunflowers nod in an artificial wind created by a crop-dusting airplane flying low overhead, an image that, in a vaguely unsettling way, mocks a natural existence out in the open. And there is footage of vegetables moving on conveyor belts to be processed by the human components of the factory, paralleling the treatment of animals in the animal-processing sequences.

EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT’S WRONG

“What the system of intensive production accomplishes is to produce a lot of food on a small amount of land at a very affordable price. Somebody explain to me what’s wrong with that.” So says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council in Food, Inc., an American documentary.

Unser Täglisch Brot can help enlighten Mr. Lobb — what’s wrong, for starters, is that the intensive production dehumanizes people and de-animalizes animals. Two other recent documentaries — Food, Inc. and We Feed the World — offer their own views on exactly what’s wrong.

None of your business

In Food, Inc., director Robert Kenner frames the issue as a matter of corporate disclosure and free speech: “This isn’t just about what we’re eating. This is about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.” Kenner asks, “What rights do human beings have, regarding their food supply?”

Food, Inc. contends that the food industry in the United States is dominated by a disproportionately small number of corporate giants, which control the chain of food creation and processing at all levels — from the smallest farmer to the very legislators who regulate the industry.

Citing statistics — for example, four beef packers control 80% of the U.S. beef market — and tracing lines of influence — for example, USDA, FDA, EPA officials in the Clinton and the G. W. Bush administrations came from Monsanto and other food-producing corporations or lobbying groups — the film catalogues a list of evils created by a system run by arrogant power brokers:

—≡—  Encouragement of illegal immigrant labor
—≡—  Human health problems
—≡—  Animal health problems
—≡—  Financial dependency of farmers
—≡—  Environmental damage
—≡—  Poor food quality

Food, Inc. connects the dots between corporate food production, a diseased food supply, and diabetes; and explains why the system promotes malnutrition-related health problems among the poor. Each item in the list above receives detailed treatment in the documentary; one example here will suffice as an example of how Food, Inc. develops its argument:

Corn, a crop heavily subsidized by the government and an ingredient in an overwhelming majority of food and non-food products, is also used as feed for all kinds of livestock, even farmed fish. Cows, whose digestive systems are not adapted to corn for feed, develop E. coli 0157:H7, the organism that periodically crops up in our food supply — it has been found not only in hamburgers and tacos, but also raw spinach and Nestlé cookie dough. When the cows’ natural diet is restored, the organism vanishes.

The corporate giants go to extreme lengths in their efforts to muzzle anyone who threatens to divulge the truth about the flaws in the system. Food, Inc. is full of examples:

—≡—  Legislators protect the big players. For example, Colorado has a “veggie libel law”: you can go to prison for criticizing a food company.

—≡—  Monsanto has brought lawsuits against farmers who have had patented Monsanto soybeans blow into their fields from those of neighboring farmers. When farmers who don’t sow Monsanto beans hire seed cleaners — independent small businesses that clean harvested seed for planting the next season — Monsanto sues them, too, claiming that their very business “induces” patent infringment because it encourages the saving of seed — even if it is not Monsanto seed that is being cleaned.

—≡—  Only deep pockets can fight the big players and win. In a well-publicized trial, Texas cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey after she made a comment about mad cow disease on her talk show. She successfully defended her right to free speech, but only after spending a million dollars in legal fees. The small farmers and seed cleaners who are sued by Monsanto typically settle out of court in an effort to avoid being driven bankrupt by legal fees — thus adding to the legal precedents that suggest that Monsanto’s claims are justified, when in reality all they suggest is that Monsanto has a larger legal fund to intimidate the small players with.

—≡—  Tyson, a giant in the poultry industry, intimidates its growers. Although they are not owned by Tyson, these growers are required to sign a contract preventing them from showing anyone — on camera or off — the inside of a henhouse that is used for housing chickens destined for Tyson. Breaking this gag rule brings immediate termination of the contract.

—≡—  The big players are fostering a dependency that is difficult if not impossible to break free of. Once you sign on the dotted line, there is no going back. As Food, Inc. points out, “A typical grower with two chicken houses has borrowed over $500,000, and earns about $18,000 a year.” How does this happen? Tyson and Perdue, the other poultry giant, require specific modifications to farmers’ henhouses — such as boarding up all windows so that the poultry will be raised in a completely artificially lighted environment. These alterations cost money, which must be spent before the farmer can begin raising the poultry that will eventually pay the loans back.

Are all corporate giants evil?

Food, Inc. offers one possible model that suggests there may be hope, that consumer input may affect the nature of the food creation and processing system.

Stonyfield Farms, a company that met with great success providing organic dairy products, has entered the realm of the big players. When Stonyfield began to claim a significant market share, it was purchased by international giant Groupe Danone. As part of the deal, Stonyfield’s founder, Gary Hirshberg, remained the CEO of Stonyfield, and he still runs the company. He says that he intended to become a big player in the food-processing system: “I realized we need to not be David up against Goliath. We need to be Goliath.”

Hirshberg wisely realized that, in this case, David stands little chance prevailing against Goliath. But has he sold out to a system that promotes illegal immigrant labor, induces human and animal health problems, creates financial dependency in its suppliers, wreaks environmental damage, and results in poor food quality?

At least on the topic of environmental impact, Hirshberg believes he is holding up a standard: “We wanted to prove that business could be part of the solution to the globe’s environmental problems, and at the same time, we had to prove that we could be highly profitable.” He claims that every time WalMart places a large order for Stonyfield yogurt, there is a corresponding reduction in the use of pesticides and other environmentally harmful practices. Hirshberg has a point: WalMart would not carry Stonyfield yogurt if there weren’t a consumer demand for it; and thus the consumers are, finally, allowed the opportunity to “vote with their wallets” and choose between two or more distinctly different offerings.

We feed the rich

Perhaps you are thinking that Unser Täglisch Brot is a parochial portrait of faults in the Austrian system of food production. You are thinking, perhaps, that Food, Inc. is an exposé of the faults in the American system.

But it would be a mistake to think locally. A second Austrian documentary, released in 2005, the same year as Unser Täglisch Brot, paints a global picture of what is wrong with the system of intensive production. We Feed the World reveals that the faults affect the food industries in countries as diverse as Austria, France, Spain, Senegal, Romania, and Brazil.

In this film, director Erwin Wagenhofer examines the relationship between wealth and poverty, food and hunger, and shows how methods of food production are not actually helping to feed the world. The opening and closing shots — ears of corn burning in red embers — express the literal truth of abundant food being wasted, and the metaphorical truth of human lives also tossed aside, by the corporatized system of food production.

—≡—  Austria: Bread that is no more than two days old is considered unfit for sale. Truckloads of it  — two million kilos a year — are thrown away every day. A truck driver remarks, “. . . even though I’ve been in the business more than ten years now and I always drive the same route, I still see old people stopping and staring, because they just can’t believe what we’re doing.” The old people, having lived through times of want, cannot grasp the decision to destroy food unnecessarily when people are going hungry every day.

—≡—  France: Small fishing business operators know what they’re doing. They read the water, the weather, and know where the fish will be. The European Union has decreed the keeping of logbooks to record such statistics, and industrial trawlers are using the data to conduct large-scale fishing. Sounds great, doesn’t it — bigger fishing operations equals more fish, more efficiency, more people fed. But two problems result from this: the trawlers cost so much to run that they must operate year-round, not seasonally, and overharvest the fish stocks; and they stay out longer and store more fish than the small fishing operators, so their fish, when they do arrive at the market, are stale and flavorless.

—≡—  Spain and Senegal: Spain has done a wonderful job establishing highly controlled greenhouses, producing a lot of tomatoes (among other things) and creating lots of new local jobs. Two problems: First, the tomatoes have no flavor (echoing the complaint in Food, Inc. that mass-produced tomatoes are “notional” tomatoes, “the idea of a tomato”). Second, in Dakar, Senegal, where the environment is great for growing vegetables, the farmers don’t have the resources to compete with the efficiency of Spanish tomato growers. The imported European vegetables are actally less expensive than their own locally grown produce, so the local farmers aren’t getting the business. They can’t sustain a living, so they take their skills and migrate (illegally) to work in the shantytowns that spring up around the big Spanish greenhouses. Local jobs — and illegal immigration, too — increase with corporatized agriculture. Food, Inc. documents the same thing happening with corn grown in the U.S., chickens produced by Perdue, and pigs produced by Smithfield. In Mexico, these food products can be purchased more cheaply than local products, resulting in loss of income for the local workers, who seek income by working illegally for their competitors in the United States. Food, Inc. points out that Perdue and Smithfield actually recruit Mexicans and advertise for their labor, yet it is the illegal immigrants themselves who find themselves in legal hot water, not the companies that have created their poverty and have exploited the cheap labor that grows from that poverty.

—≡—  Romania: Pioneer Romania, a corporation owned by the American giant DuPont, behaves in Romania much as Monsanto does in the U.S. Pioneer is supported by the Romanian government, giving subsidies to farmers so that they will choose its patented, genetically modified eggplant seed. The seeds are hybrids, which can’t be harvested and used in the next year’s planting — and thus the cycle of farmer dependency on the corporate giant begins. When the state withdraws its subsidy — which, inevitably, it does — the farmers are hobbled and cannot sever the ties with the corporate food producer.

—≡—  Brazil: The soil in Brazil is just no good for growing soybeans — all of the necessary nutrients must be added from the outside — yet massive acres of rainforest are cleared continually in order to grow soybeans. Worse, these soybeans are grown for export to Europe, China, and Japan. In Europe, ninety percent of this soy feeds not people, but livestock. We Feed the World spends some time showing footage of a family suffering from starvation in Brazil; they could use the soybeans, or some other more suitable crop, to sustain their lives and health. The irony of millions of acres of food going to livestock in Europe when people living adjacent to the fields are dying of starvation is pathetic and rich.

—≡—  Austria: Peter Brabek, CEO of Nestlé, patiently instructs his interviewer in the commercial value of drinking water: “Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatise the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.”

“Free Trade” is not free

When big corporations control the entire system of food production — from the people who grow the food to the politicians who write legislation regulating the industry and ostensibly protecting citizens from corporate abuses of the system — there is no such thing as a free market. As Jean Ziegler, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, points out in We Feed the World, “Free trade has nothing to do with freedom, that’s an enormous lie. It’s the freedom of the predatory animal in the jungle when Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate. That’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an undernourished Bengali.”

Just give me the money

Undoubtedly, large corporations in any commercial sector provide abundant jobs and affect the standard of living for many, many people, either directly or indirectly. The UN’s Jean Ziegler notes that Nestlé is “the largest food product corporation in the world, with almost 300,000 employees, active on five continents, controlling over 8,000 brands.” Take the number of human beings affected by Nestlé and multiply it by the number of large food-producing giants, and the you’re looking at a powerful force in the lives of millions.

But if you look behind the public face of the corporations, which desire to portray themselves as benign employers, you will find a hand outstretched, palm up — not to help, but to receive money. It is not surprising that Tyson, Monsanto, Smithfield, and Perdue all declined to be interviewed for Food, Inc. — when the veil comes off, when the motive behind the activity is revealed, human workers disappear and the message becomes, “Just give me the money.”

MY FOOD, MYSELF

I think that I am not the only one to have an uneasy relationship with my food.

At different times, I’ve been a vegetarian (on the grounds of not desiring to exploit animals), a non-veal-eater (on the grounds of not wanting to promote inhumane treatment of one particular animal), and an avoider of processed foods (on the grounds of wanting to consume food as close to nature as possible).

My friend H———— raises some animals for her family’s consumption. Among the beef, goats, chickens, and other livestock she keeps, she has the most difficulty when it comes to killing the rabbits. “I look up to God and say a prayer thanking Him for our food,” she says. “I cry every time.”

I think that both H———— and I regard animals as a part of God’s creation, and human beings, by virtue of our sheer ability to arrange and control our environment, as their stewards. Human beings, we feel, have a trust to maintain. If we have been created carnivores, then we should exercise our natural desire for meat in a responsible way.

But the way food has come to be produced in this world bothers me and, evidently, others as well. Three fairly recent films — Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread), Food, Inc., and We Feed the World — examine and criticize the global corporatization and industrialization of food production.

The “natural,” old-fashioned method of containing the food cycle all in one place — for example, calves born on a farm are raised in a field there, eat grass, fertilize the field with their manure, are slaughtered and cut up into beef parcels onsite, and sold onsite or nearby — has been replaced by the big food corporations with a system that compartmentalizes each phase in the cycle, supposedly for the economies of scale and efficiency of mass-production.

According to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who was interviewed for Food, Inc., the economies are false ones. The hidden costs — producing and harvesting the feed for the calves, transporting their feed to the pens in which they are housed, and carting away their manure — are all costs that simply do not exist in the self-contained method.

There are other, less direct “costs,” too. Salatin points out that the price of the industrialized food commodity can swing widely based on factors related to industrialization. For example, the production of a single steer consumes 75 gallons of oil; if petroleum prices rise, then the cost of beef will rise as well.

The human costs of corporatized, industrial food production are also significant. The films discussed in this blog describe health problems in both workers who produce food and people who consume it; poverty and malnutrition resulting both from the subsidies of nutritionally poor food options as well as the encouragement of cheap or illegal labor; and a loss of the sense that one’s work has meaning among employees of the big food producers.

GIVE US MEANING, GIVE US FOOD TO CARE FOR

Nestlé’s Peter Brabek was a fool to allow himself to be interviewed at length for We Feed the World. After extolling the power of Nestlé to improve the lives of so many people — his company employs so many and they in turn are responsible for so many more — a sort of force for good — Brabek leads his interviewer down the gleaming, utterly unpopulated corridors of Nestlé’s headquarters on Lake Geneva. Spotting a TV monitor showing a mechanized Japanese factory, Brabek pauses to admire the video, pointing it out to his interviewer. His voice is full of admiration: “The Japanese. You can see how modern these facilities are; highly robatised, almost no people.”

Almost no people. That, clearly, is the dream of big food producers. To be able to produce food without employees would indeed be wonderful. Just give me the money. People are expendable in the manufacturing end as well as in the receiving end of the system.

Perhaps we should embrace Brabek’s dream. If his methods of food production result in persons whose work strips their lives of a sense of meaning, then perhaps people ought to be removed entirely from that equation.

But to do that would be to give the stewardship of animals and plants to the corporate giants, and that would be a sin.

We need to take back the right to have meaning in our lives and in our care for the other creatures on this earth.

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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S O U R C E S :

We Feed the World —≡—  Erwin Wagenhofer, director —≡—  Austria —≡—  released September 10, 2005 at the Toronto International Film Festival —≡—  Awards: 2006, Best Documentary (Guild of German Art House Cinemas); 2006, Amnesty International Award (Motovun Film Festival); 2006, FIPRESCI Prize (Motovun Film Festival); Nominated, 2009, Sundance Film Festival (nominated for Grand Jury Prize).

Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread) —≡—  Nikolaus Geyrhalter, director —≡—  Austria —≡—  released November 28, 2005 at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival —≡—  Awards: 2005, Special Jury Award (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival); 2008, Adolf Grimme Award (Adolf Grimme Awards, Germany); Nominated, Best Documentary Award (European Film Awards).

Food, Inc. —≡—  Robert Kenner, director —≡—  United States —≡—  released September 7, 2008 at the Toronto International Film Festival —≡—  Awards: Nominated for the 2020 Academy Award, Documentary Feature category (15 nominations).

My dream is to sail away, someday, with my spouse.

I want to go where the wind takes us, visit interesting new places, visit parts of this Earth slowly, tuck our boat away in secluded anchorages, and generally enjoy life from our floating home.

The dream includes a lot of reading, of course. Every sailor I know loves to read. Reading in the midst of paradise is just wonderful; when you have few ties — to land, place, deadline, interpersonal dynamics — it’s easy to suspend your own life and become absorbed into the life of the book. Reading is also useful to while away time during periods of bad weather.

Also — and I say this cautiously because I myself really, really hate hearing other people’s music breaking up the peaceful sounds of nature — I want to be able to listen to my own music when I want to — through headphones, or very quietly through the boat’s speakers if I’m not out on the open sea.

But there’s no room!

The problem is, our sailboat is only twenty feet long. There is a bookshelf, all right, but it will be filled with cruising guides, a first-aid book, engine manuals, piloting and sailing volumes, and other essential reference works.

Space that isn’t used for necessary written material will be filled with food, clothing, spare parts, and all of the sundry items that must accompany us wherever we sail.

I seriously doubt we’ll be able to find space for the number of books I envision wanting!

Enter Kindle and its ilk

Kindle DX

I’ve made a promise to myself: Amazon’s Kindle DX — or something very like it — is going to be my gift to each of us on the day we depart for our adventure.

This wonderful piece of electronica is about the size of an issue of Sail magazine, holds about 3500 books, works for about a week on one battery charge, and lets you download books anywhere in the U.S. (and many other places, too) because it’s connected to the 3G network.

Also, this item is able to accept pdf files, so I can load it with the pdf versions of my manuals, user guides, and other boat documentation, thus further relieving — or at least having a backup to — my overburdened bookshelf.

For two Kindles — because I hate to share — we would spend just under $1000, though I hope this price comes down as Amazon’s competitors introduce their own products.

iPod

My iPod has a sweet little gizmo that plugs into my car’s 12-volt socket to play my MP3 files through the FM radio.

My tiny sailboat also has a 12-volt socket, and a stereo system complete with pretty nice speakers and FM radio, in addition to its CD player.

Hmmm … why bring a stack of CDs when I can just bring my iPod and the gizmo? I’ve already tried it out, and it works just as well in the boat as it does in the car.

A 32 gig iPod Touch, which holds up to 7000 songs, currently sells for about $300 — that’s half the cost of the same item about a year ago. Not bad.

MacBook

I’ll admit that I am, and have always been, a fan of the Mac.

My cellphone would be an iPhone if I could afford the monthly fee.

But I won’t consider my cruising inventory complete without a laptop computer. As with the Kindle, I may use it to store redundant copies of pdf documents. But more importantly, it can be used in numerous ways for email, weather tracking, updates to our navigational charts, processing digital photographs taken during our adventure — and, of course, writing.

Apple is selling its latest laptop, the MacBook, for $1000.

Priceless

I have just talked about spending nearly $2300, which doesn’t even include the cost of book downloads for the Kindle (around $10 each), music files ($1.29 each), or software for the computer (thousands, probably).

Of course, I already own the iPod, and an antiquated laptop, but I may need to spring for new ones. I hope the prices will all come down.

All I can say to this immense outlay for electronic gadgetry primarily directed at our amusement is, consider the alternatives:

—≡—  1. We do not bring books or CDs, and slowly go psychotic from lack of reading or music to soothe the savage breast.

—≡—  2. We bring the books and CDs, and forfeit clothing, thus finding ourselves gravitating to nudist destinations.

—≡—  3. We bring the books and CDs, and forfeit food, thus committing ourselves to the peripatetic lives of mendicants — or, less elegantly, dock mooches who routinely crash parties and bum food off generous fellow sailors.

I think that any of the above alternatives will drive us back to life ashore prematurely, perhaps with the added expense of therapy. Life ashore is more expensive than life afloat, almost by definition. Throw therapy in, and you’re talking serious money.

My boat is my therapy, and hence worth the money. Priceless, in fact.

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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A week ago, I needed to go somewhere a couple hours’ drive away, and I was listening to the local country music station during the trip.

All of a sudden, it occurred to me that I had heard at least three songs during the preceding forty minutes or so that described what it meant to “be Country.” That got me to wondering:

—≡—  Stereotypes. Do the Country songs describing what it means to “be Country” reinforce old stereotypes about Country musicians and their fans, or do they offer some nuanced insights?

—≡—  Who is Country? Are these songs describing what “being Country” means to the Country musicians, to their listeners, or both?

—≡—  Is Country a lifestyle? Is “being Country” simply a description of the themes and images appropriate to Country music, or is it a description of the lifestyle of those who love Country music?

—≡—  Do all musicians do this? Do the writers of other music genres — rock, punk, metal, folk, for example — talk about themselves this way?

What Country is, and is not

Two songs seem to be receiving a lot of play on the radio right now: “That’s How Country Boys Roll,” vigorously performed by Billy Currington, and “A Little More Country Than That,” a gentle love song offered by Easton Corbin.

Currington’s song has so far reached a rank of #14 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, with Corbin’s song not far behind, at #19.

“That’s How Country Boys Roll” presents a litany of tried-and-true stereotypes of “Country boys.” Currington’s Country boys live in a world of extremes, no half-measures — a world whose fixtures include bars, fishing, back roads, fast cars, baseball, and weekend barbecues.

They’re self-destructive, irreverent, and anti-authoritarian — they chew tobacco, soup up cars “just to see how fast they’ll go,” go drinking and singing in bars, and generally “spin their wheels.” But Country boys also embody the values of generosity, faithfulness, and work ethic — they “do everything heart and soul,” “love their woman one beat shy of a heart attack,” “work, work, work, all week ’til the job gets done,” will “give you the shirt off their back,” and “if you don’t know your way around they’ll draw you a map.” Paradoxically “humble and proud,” they “love Momma and Jesus and Jones.” Their needs are few — they “run on a big ol’ heart and a pinch of Skoal”; “all they need is a little gas, a few dollars to hold.”

So Currington defines “being Country” in terms of specific character details — attitudes about working hard, playing hard, and loving hard — and specific locale details — places and things found only in rural settings.

Corbin’s “A Little More Country Than That” seems at first to work against the stereotypes that people Currington’s song. The first two stanzas present the standard Country furniture. The rural features include “a dirt road full of potholes with a creek bank and some cane poles, catching channel cat,” “a small town with an old hound laying in front of the courthouse while the old men chew the fat,” and “Hank” songs — referring either to Country music superstar Hank Williams or to his equally famous son, Hank Williams, Jr.

But the concluding line of each stanza challenges the “Country-ness” of the preceding stereotypical images. When Corbin sings that he’s “a little more Country than that,” he is saying, in effect, “Those descriptions are not real Country, or not Country enough.” Authentic Country is an intensification, somehow, of the stereotypical images.

What content does Corbin offer to define or describe what it is to be “Country enough”? In this song, the only positive statement of what it means to be “just the right amount of Country” comes in the lines about how a man relates to the woman he wants to marry: “Girl, I’m not the kind to two-time or play games behind your back; I’m a little more Country than that.” “This ring ain’t some thing that I mean to give you and then take back; I’m a little more Country than that.” From this we conclude that being “a little more Country” involves a certain quality of character, a values system that includes honesty, faithfulness, and forthrightness.

Lest you think that Corbin is denying the legitimacy of the old physical, rural content of what it means to be “Country,” he includes one stanza near the end of the song that, perplexingly, wrenches the song away from the theme of Country-as-character, returning to the theme of Country-as-setting. He has already said that rural roads, fishing in creeks, and lazy town-green life are not fully Country. But he also sets up a boundary at the other end, so to speak. As if he is afraid of straying too far from the standard Country images, he includes a description of a setting that is unacceptably non-Country: “If you want a brick home in a school zone with the doors locked and alarms on, Girl, you’re way off track.” Be forewarned: I want you, I want to marry you, I promise to be faithful to you and be honest with you, but watch out — you’d better not stray too far from my expectations. The suburban lifestyle is not Country enough to suit me.

Country is a birthright

Another song receiving some airtime now, though it doesn’t seem to have ranked on the charts yet, is a sweet number by Luke Bryan. “What Country Is” is little more than a series of vignettes, a catalogue of dreamy images followed by the refrain, “That’s what Country is.”

The list, consisting of soft-focus snapshots of food, farmhouse, and landscape fragments, evokes a timeless rural setting. Houseflies, horse stalls, cantaloupe and buttered biscuits, box fans and cane fishing poles, sunset and moonlight — images like these create a whole fabric of Country-ness, an almost-fantasy world never touched by tragedy or difficulty.

Bryan works against the notion of Country-as-fantasy, however, in three lines that seem to have slipped into his otherwise unapologetically sweet picture. Around the middle of the song, he says that Country “ain’t a rebel flag you bought at the mall”; it “ain’t a John Deere cap that’s never fell in the cotton”; and near the end, that it “ain’t a jacked-up truck that’s never seen a pasture.” Clearly, authentic “Country” has something to do with appearance matching reality. Like Corbin, Bryan defines “Country” partially by what it is not — although, unlike Corbin, he spends a great deal of time describing what it is.

The final line of “What Country Is” (before the repeated refrain) takes the entire rest of the song — the whole idyllic tapestry he has built to evoke the images of Country — and constructs an impenetrable stone wall around it. Country, he sings, “can’t be bought; it’s something you’re born with.” In this single line, Bryan defines Country as a birthright, unattainable by those on the outside, the rightful property of those lucky enough to have been born on the inside. Country, evidently, has nothing to do with choice, with intention, with will, but everything to do with variables utterly outside one’s own control. You either have it or you don’t. Lucky you.

Hank Williams and Hank Williams, Jr.

In the songs under discussion here, “Hank” appears as an icon of what it means to “be Country.” I’d love to hear from students of Country music whether a simple reference to “Hank” authoritatively signifies either Hank Williams or his son, Hank Williams, Jr., but in the absence of better information, I have drawn the conclusion that “Hank” may refer both to Bocephus (Hank, Jr.’s nickname) and to his father.

The personal lives of both men mirror the rough lives depicted in their music — hard-driving, self-destructive, extreme, plagued by alcohol abuse and broken relationships. Other clues may yield insight into which artist is being alluded to in the songs currently playing on the radio.

Corbin’s song, “A Little More Country Than That,” refers to the “steel ride” in a Hank song sending “chills up your back.” The Drifting Cowboys, the band formed by the older Hank Williams, was known for its steel guitar sound.

On the other hand, the older Hank Williams, although extremely influential, died in 1953 at the age of 29. Bocephus, on the other hand, is still performing, and is more likely to be referred to when talking about playing Country music on the radio as you drive around town, as in the songs cited in this post.

Also — though this is a more vague form of evidence — the older Hank Williams is better known for his blues themes, songs about loss in love, heartache, and the struggles of relationships. Bocephus’s discography includes these kinds of songs, too, but — increasingly in the last couple of decades — contains more of the hell-bent-for-leather themes and images found in the songs I’m discussing in this blog.

In the end, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t really matter which Williams is being alluded to in these songs; and perhaps the songwriters are intending to evoke both of them in the single reference “Hank.” Together, their lives form a continuous thread of “the Life” of Country; together, they pretty much cover the themes under discussion — the internal and the external, the personal relationships and the physical settings. The fact that there is a third Hank Williams (aka Hank 3) rising in the Country music scene can’t hurt.

Nearly thirty years ago, Hank Williams, Jr. wrote a song that anticipates the songs I’m discussing today. “Country Boy Can Survive,” released in 1981, rose to #2 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart. This song is more specific than the offerings of Currington, Corbin, and Bryan; and it offers even more stark contrasts between Country and not-Country.

Foremost, Bocephus defines “Country folks” as survivors — and what do they survive? Hank’s song covers everything from obtaining food to the apocalypse — unimaginable trials like “the end of time” and the Mississippi River running dry — national-scale trials like Stock Market declines and rising interest rates — and personal trials like being mugged, robbed, and facing starvation.

Survival, according to this song, comes from possessing the skills of the self-reliant — knowing how to use a shotgun, a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a plow, a fishing pole, and a trotline. It comes from a refusal to give up —  “you can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run.”

And, although authentic Country folks come from far-flung places like West Virginia, the Rocky Mountains, North Carolina, “south Alabam,” and “the western skies,” they most certainly do not come from New York City, where people don’t know “how to live off the land” and ultimately are defenseless against those who use switchblade knives to kill them in order to get forty-three dollars. A “Country boy” would, in that situation, use the skills he had brought with him into that foreign place, “spit some Beechnut in that dude’s eyes and shoot him with my old 45.”

Finally, Bocephus draws a line around what is Country in order to establish who is “inside” and who is “outside” — “We say grace and we say Ma’am, and if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn.” The world is divided into “we” and “you” — and you can just stay outside our camp.

Why now?

Clearly, Country musicians have been thinking about what it is to “be Country” for at least thirty years. But why the noticeable revival of that theme, that introspection, now? The three songs receiving a lot of airplay right now do not represent a wholly new trend in Country music, but they certainly echo Hank Williams, Jr.’s song in more overt ways than they have for a long, long time.

Other songs in the last couple of years have laid the groundwork for the songs plying the airwaves today.

In 2008, “Country Man,” also by Luke Bryan, reached #10 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. Less specific and detailed than “What Country Is,” this song talks about the essential manliness of Country men — their muscles are developed as only those of farmworkers can be; they cure ham; they grow their food; they are handy, hotwiring vehicles with ease; they “wrestle hogs and gators.” They think a good pick-up line is “Why don’t you come and join me in my new deer stand,” and seek a “good ole’ country girlfriend” who will be attracted by this kind of line. This song, too, uses negative images to define what Country is not — iPods, Humvees, and the rock band Hoobastank are contrasted with tape players, Jeeps with camouflage seats, and Hank (again, either Hank Williams or Hank Williams, Jr.).

And in 2007, Canadian Country artist Paul Brandt offered “Country Girl,” a song seeking to define Country in its female form as a package of particular character traits — gold-hearted, tender, parent-loving, Jesus-loving, unafraid, independent, wild — and physical attributes — clad in overalls, hair braided, barefoot, and (repeatedly) attractive: “pretty as a picture”; “man does she look good”; “ain’t she beautiful” (twice); “she can’t help but turn the head of every guy.” Physical beauty is evidently one hallmark of a Country girl.

It’s possible to find other songs in recent years that comment on what it means to “be Country,” though they don’t seem quite as self-conscious about drawing boundaries and defining what is “inside” and “outside” the realm of Country.

My theory is that most of the last decade has been influenced markedly by the events of 09/11/2001. Popular music — not only Country, but Pop, Rock, Folk, and other genres — has offered a variety of songs containing patriotic themes, drawing the sorts of boundaries I’ve been discussing around what it is to be “American,” and talking about the character of Americans.

I think that Country artists are doing a similar thing, only on a smaller scale: there is a sense, in all the songs discussed here, that people who love and who listen to Country music are an embattled minority with turf to define and defend. They don’t speak with one voice, really — the values and character attributes they specify aren’t the same across all of the songs — but they seem agreed on the fact that there is a values structure which ought to be respected as a legitimate test of what is authentically Country.

As one might expect, “being Country” sometimes resembles a lifestyle, sometimes an intentional set of choices about how to approach life, and sometimes an inherent quality that can’t be earned, learned, or achieved. It reminds me of talk about immigrant versus native-born: some want to allow people within our borders if they promise to assimilate and become good citizens, while others are more isolationist and unwilling to recognize any legitimacy in the desire to come inside the circle. One wonders how far back in Country music history you’d have to go to find “native-born” Country folk. Because at one time, there was no Country music at all, and we were all immigrants to it.

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

≡≡≡≡  my sources for this post appear at the end of the post.  ≡≡≡≡

Two days after Thanksgiving, the British Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Wave Knight delivered a most unusual cargo to the United Kingdom.

It had carried its significant burden around 6,500 miles (via the Suez Canal)  —  from approximately 60 miles west of the town of Victoria in the Seychelles to Portland, Dorset, in the UK.

The Seychelles are a group of islands just below the Equator in the Indian Ocean. Mahé, the largest island in the group and home to Victoria, is less than 20 miles long and around 6 miles wide at its widest point. Besides a couple of tiny islands nearby, the closest large land mass nearby is Madagascar, about 500 miles to the southwest. Somalia, Kenya’s northern neighbor on the east coast of Africa, is around 750 miles to the west.

What was this precious cargo?

If you had been on the dock in Dorset early in the morning of November 28, you would have seen a crane transferring a home from ship to shore.

An empty home whose owners have been held hostage in Somalia for more than a month.

Wave Knight was delivering Lynn Rival, a 38-foot sailboat, back to its homeland.

What happened to the inhabitants of Lynn Rival?

Somali pirates boarded Lynn Rival in the small hours (around 2:30 a.m.) on October 23, removing Rachel and Paul Chandler.

The Chandlers  —  or someone aboard Lynn Rival  —  activated their EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) at 2200 Greenwich Mean Time. Soon thereafter the EPIRB was deactivated, it is unclear by whom.

The Chandlers had left the Seychelles less than two days earlier, and were sailing southwest toward Tanzania. They made it only a little ways offshore, into the middle of nowhere, when they were taken forcibly from their home.

The kidnappers transferred the Chandlers to the container ship Kota Wajar, a Singapore-flagged vessel that they had hijacked on October 16, 150 miles north of the Seychelles and about 550 miles from Somalia. On October 29, they permitted Mr Chandler to make a cellphone call to a news agency in the UK. Mr Chandler reported that the Kota Wajar was lying at anchor one mile off the Somali coast. The transcript reveals the approximate location of the container ship, but ends when Mr Chandler is asked how he and his wife are being treated.

One week after the Chandlers’ kidnapping, on October 30, their abductors demanded a ransom of 4.7 million Euros. That’s more than 7 million U.S. dollars, or more than 4 million British pounds. The kidnappers made their demand over the phone, and both Mr and Mrs Chandler were allowed to speak during the phone call. Both hostages claimed to be in good health physically but sounded terribly distressed.

The day after the ransom demand, the kidnappers moved the Chandlers to a hidden location on dry land in Somalia. Presumably, they are still there.

On November 18, the Chandlers were videotaped  —  their kidnappers pointing weapons at them in the background  —  presumably to encourage the delivery of ransom money. Both Mr and Mrs Chandler spoke, saying that they were healthy but under stress and believed that they would be killed unless the ransom were paid.

Other, unconfirmed bits of information have surfaced:
—≡—  On October 31, Islamic militia groups reportedly argued with the Chandlers’ kidnappers  —  they preferred to trade the Chandlers for seven pirates who had been captured earlier that week.
—≡—  On November 5, townspeople in the location where the Chandlers were being held reportedly engaged in an armed fight with the kidnappers  —  the residents didn’t want their town being used as a hostage hideout. The kidnappers reportedly left with the Chandlers for a new secret location.

A Royal Navy ship witnessed the kidnapping

Wave Knight, the British Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship that has delivered Lynn Rival home to the UK, stood by helplessly as the Chandlers were abducted from their home. Although the ship had a crew of 100 and a helicopter, it was not prepared to engage the kidnappers.

A spokesperson for the Royal Navy defended the inaction: “What you have got is a hostile situation with a bunch of pirates who are clearly unhappy; you have really got to be absolutely sure of what you are doing before you start trying to release hostages because you could end up with the hostages getting killed. . . . What you have got is a small open boat which is crammed full of pirates armed with AK47s and rocket-propelled grenades and two middle-aged yachties, all loaded into this small boat which is full of fuel. . . . [Wave Knight] has a helicopter and a helicopter crew and some self-defense weapons but she doesn’t have a crew of snipers. . . . [They didn't] have someone who is competent with a sniper rifle  —  and this is a very high level of competence  —  to start slotting pirates.”

If the Chandlers are ultimately executed by their captors, everyone will wish that the Wave Knight had intervened. The nearest warship was two hours away; by the time it arrived on the scene, the Chandlers were long gone.

But I think that the Royal Navy offers a reasonable defense. I believe that the commander of the Wave Knight had no prudent course of action other than standing by. Perhaps because the British ship was nearby, the kidnappers quickly removed the Chandlers to a fast skiff and made their getaway without looting or scuttling the Lynn Rival. This enabled the Wave Knight to take the Chandlers’ home as cargo and return her to the UK.

Lynn Rival is the Chandlers’ only asset, according to their relatives. The Chandlers sold their land-based home to purchase and outfit their seagoing home. If the Chandlers are lucky enough to be released from captivity, they will have something to come home to. Since the Wave Knight was powerless to prevent their capture, at least it was able to preserve their home and their only property in this world.

Why am I interested in this?

I worry about pirates.

The Chandlers were aware of the intense pirate activity in the Indian Ocean. They assessed the risks when devising their voyaging schedule. And, though aware of the risks, they chose to cruise in dangerous regions with their eyes wide open. Nevertheless, they did not deserve to be kidnapped.

It is also astonishing to me that a tiny 38-foot sailboat would be spotted, much less boarded, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. To locate a tiny dot in the middle of an ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest large land mass and 60 miles from the tiny island from which they departed days earlier, is a feat that confounds the mind.

Tankers and container ships are large targets, and are targeted for obvious financial motives. But an ordinary, middle-aged couple was targeted for a possible, relatively paltry, ransom  —  with no guarantee that the ransom would ever be paid. The kidnappers couldn’t have known in advance whether the Chandlers had wealthy relatives (they don’t), or whether the British government would be willing to pony up for two regular citizens (they haven’t so far).

Part of me wants to argue that ordinary folks should deny kidnappers their ransom  —  or they will keep on abducting us ordinary folks to get more, more, more. Governments shouldn’t be coerced into paying for our safe return. We are, after all, plying the seas on our own chosen adventures, cognizant of the risks. That is not like ships, which need to travel the dangerous routes in order to deliver goods.

But if I were in the Chandlers’ shoes, I am pretty sure I would make the phone calls and videos trying to secure my own release. Even if I wanted to resist my captors’ demands and refuse to participate in their ransom demands, I think that an AK47 held to my head would persuade me to go along with their coercive schemes.

What are cruisers to do? Commit suicide rather than be taken captive by pirates? Resist making phone calls or videotapes, which is the same as committing suicide, only by a manner not of their choosing?

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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S O U R C E S :

You can see a photo of the Chandlers’ sailboat being lowered from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Wave Knight to a transport lorry in the United Kingdom at http://www.sail-world.com/USA/Kidnapped-sailors-yacht-arrives-Britain—alone/63823.

The transcript of the October 29 cellphone call with Mr Chandler can be found at http://yachtpals.com/yacht-pirates-7055. This is my most comprehensive source of the timeline, details, and unconfirmed bits of information on this story.

The October 30 phone call demanding ransom money is described at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1224103/Paul-Rachel-Chandler-Somali-pirates-expected-make-ransom-demand-return-hijacked-Britons.html.

Details of the November 18 video are at http://yachtpals.com/pirate-chandler-7071.

Information about the Wave Knight standing by while the Chandlers were kidnapped can be found at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/6560063/Royal-Navy-watched-helpless-as-pirates-kidnapped-yacht-couple-Paul-and-Rachel-Chandler.html.

Here are links to other sources that contain details used in this blog entry: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/somali-pirates-british-yacht. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/kent/8327416.stm.

I have been busy with NaNoWriMo this month, so this blog, barely begun, was derailed almost immediately.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been working or writing, however: besides my paying work, I’ve written a big chunk of my novel — 42,212 words — between November 1 and the end of the day yesterday.

That’s a lot of words! I need to have 50,000 words by midnight on November 30 in order to “win”; and at this point, I’m pretty far ahead of the daily goal (I should have written 31,667 words by the end of the day today) — but I feel like a winner already. I’m excited about the project, and the story is not awful.

I was talked into becoming a “Wrimo” and “doing NaNo” this year by Abigail, who did it last year. Though she began a week into the contest and didn’t top 50,000 words, she came close and had a lot of fun doing it. She’s doing great this year, ahead of schedule also. Kudos!

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It was started by a guy named Chris Baty and a few friends in 1999. It has grown annually from that handful of aspiring authors to more than 119 thousand in 2008. Not sure how many this year. The idea is to get into “writer’s mode” by writing swiftly and copiously, with as little editing as possible, so as to overcome writer’s block. Editing can come later. Hence the draconian schedule of 50k words in 30 days.

Under NaNo rules, you’re not allowed to write together. But my writing buddy and I have been comparing notes on our methods, and they differ quite a bit. She had done a lot of “pre-writing” — allowed by NaNo — outlining her book. She is much more methodical than I am, and says she feels comfortable writing her novel in linear fashion from the outline she constructed.

I, on the other hand, pre-wrote a set of character sketches that, altogether, would have fit on an index card. I had a sketchy idea of the plot, but nothing more. I’ve been writing “scenes” all out of order, taking whatever scene interests me at the moment. One of the results of this unplanned approach is that the characters have developed autonomous lives, making demands and behaving in unanticipated ways. I find this energizing but have to make continual adjustments and notes for later editing.

And you know what? It works. I’ve allowed myself to edit just a little bit — I allow myself about ten minutes at the beginning of each writing session to add details and dialogue to previously written material. I’ve found that if I don’t, I fret about forgetting material I wanted to add, or else I feel obliged to jot down notes on it so I won’t forget (which takes more time than just putting it in!). I figure that as long as I’m meeting the word count, so what? Believe me, there’s plenty of baaaad writing in this novel that I’ll have editing aplenty when the rough draft is done! But I love it! It’s very gratifying. I hope I can keep it up after December 1!

Right now, I anticipate that I’ll be writing well into December, long after I’ve hit the 50k mark. The book doesn’t seem as if it will be finished in another 8,000 words. Wish me luck!

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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C H E C K    I T   O U T :

Find out more at http://www.nanowrimo.org. And plan to join me next year! You won’t be sorry.

≡≡≡≡  my sources for this post appear at the end of the post.  ≡≡≡≡

We are all aware that inappropriate posts to social networking sites can get you in trouble. My usual advice is to post only what you would not mind the whole world reading — imagine that you’re posting a note on a public bulletin board.

But who would believe that the post “You’re not gonna bust a grape” would get someone suspended for the rest of the school year?

Keyshaun Harley, an honor student with no history of trouble, posted this simple comment on a friend’s Facebook page. Apparently two female acquaintances were arguing about fighting. Harley’s comment can be loosely translated as “You’re so weak, you couldn’t even win a fight with a grape.” My source for this story is not entirely clear on whose page Harley chose to post his comment. But the source says that a parent reported the post to the principal of Harley’s school. The school then accused Harley of “cyber-bullying” and suspended him for 180 days, which amounts to the remainder of the school year.

Even with the murky detail of the original story, I just about went apoplectic when I read this. I am waiting for someone from the ACLU to step up, take Harley’s case, and sue the school board and, possibly, the parents (or the “friend”) who forwarded Harley’s message to the school principal. There are so many things wrong with this situation:

—≡—  “You’re not gonna bust a grape” could be seen as a dismissive comment intended to defuse the rising emotions and point out the foolhardiness of contemplating entering into a fight. I think this interpretation is more plausible than the school’s assertion that Harley was trying to incite (or “insight,” as author Danya Bacchus spelled it in the story) a fight.

—≡—  The post hardly amounts to “cyber-bullying” — there is no evidence that it is part of a pattern of behavior, or one in a series of comments, aimed by Harley at his Facebook friend.

—≡—  If the Facebook friend had been offended by Harley’s comments, she or he could have easily “un-friended” Harley with one click of the mouse … and never been bothered by Harley’s posts again.

—≡—  I am just speculating here, but doesn’t the parent reporting the post to the school principal smack of cheap vindictiveness and a desire to ruin Harley’s future by means of a raw exercise of power (parents and school board against a teenager)? The actions of the parent, and the chain reaction of events that followed, seem horrifically disproportionate to the original post.

—≡—  Harley did attempt to explain himself, saying that “really I was trying to tell everybody there is no reason to be talking like this because nobody is really going to fight.” The story doesn’t report any argument by the school board concerning why we should not accept Harley’s own explanation. And, because the six-word post doesn’t seem self-evidently bullying or hostile in nature, I wonder why the school board (and the parent) arrived at the conclusion that the post was an instance of cyber-bullying.

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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S O U R C E S :

I first came across this story on http://www.detentionslip.org, which referred me to the account on the Memphis, TN channel 3 online news site at http://www.wreg.com/wreg-mcs-student-suspended-180-days,0,1325790.story.

I created this blog because I wanted to keep a diary recording my reflections on events of the day. I enjoy the social aspects offered by the Internet and think it’s a great medium for shared opinions and discussion. I find the opportunity for visitors to opt in or out, to read or to ignore, very appealing.

I’m also intrigued by the paradoxically ephemeral-permanent quality of posted material on the Internet. No sooner keyboarded, zap! — it’s out there for anyone with a search engine to access. Another keystroke, zap! — it is removed. Another keystroke, zap! — someone has copied, forwarded, or appropriated it for their own use (or misuse), and it has gotten out of your control forever.

I hope you enjoy the blog. Feel free to comment below.