canadians: endangered monkeys need your help. please help them.

Photo: Ignacio Yufera

An activist friend alerted me to this a while back. I wasn't able to focus on it -- ironically, because it's something I care so deeply about. 

Animal cruelty is the one place I can't go. Allan is the same way. We donate to animal-related causes, and we don't pretend it's not out there. But we both avert our gaze, because we find it too painful to face. 

I'm sure many of you are the same.

If this describes you, and you don't want to know too much about the issue, please just click here to sign a petition. I know some people have problems with PETA, but PETA is the only group working on this right now. I hope you will put your qualms aside and add your name with a simple click.

The issue in its briefest form: endangered macaque monkeys are being captured from the wild and imported into Canada for experimentation. There is no rational justification for this.

This is not only an issue of animals and the environment: it is also an issue of human health. COVID, HIV, and other infectious diseases originated when animal pathogens were transmitted to humans.

The US has already banned this. A reminder that Canada is not always more progressive than the neighbour we love to hate.

Canadian scholars and researchers have called on the Trudeau government to take action. Please join them.

Everyone can and should oppose this, no matter what you choose to eat or wear. 

Click here to send a letter to Canadian officials, demanding this abhorrent practice be banned.

More information below, if you want it.

*  *  *  *  *

Canadian scholars and researchers call on Trudeau government to stop importation of endangered primates for experimentation

For release November 7, 2024 - 8:00 EST

[Québec City, QC and Toronto, ON]—As Charles River Laboratories is scheduled to bring yet another plane load of hundreds of endangered macaque monkeys into Montreal via a Sky Taxi airline flight today, more than 80 Quebec and Canadian university professors, researchers, and clinicians have released their letter calling on the Canadian Government to stop importing primates for biomedical experimentation.

The letter includes support from renowned zoologist Dr. David Suzuki, CC OBC FRSC; Avi Lewis at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Climate Justice; international law professor and former member of parliament Craig Scott; Dr. Laura Mae Lindo, social justice scholar and former Ontario member of provincial parliament; Dr. Kendra Coulter, an expert on animal labour at Western University’s Huron University College; and Dr. Melissa Lem, a family medicine professor at UBC and the president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE).

It reads, in part:

A decade ago, chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, ceased to be used for experimentation because using such animal "models" could no longer be justified from scientific, ethical, and/or financial perspectives. Despite the emergence of many new methodologies, including organs-on-chips, 3D bioprinted tissues, organoids, advances in in silico modelling, stem cell-derived models, multiomics, and systems biology approaches, the pharmaceutical industry suppliers have dramatically increased their reliance on another primate species for biomedical experimentation, the long-tailed macaque.

In addition to the rapid disappearance of macaques in Asia, we are also concerned about the serious risks of transmission of zoonotic pathogens (diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans), which are the highest in primates and bats.[3] The trade in certain macaque species has a high zoonotic potential.[4] In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, we urge extreme caution regarding human exposure to zoonotic pathogens linked to the international wildlife trade.

We the undersigned urge the Canadian government to:

• End illegal charter flights organized by Charles River Laboratories to import monkeys via SkyTaxi or any other airline; 

• Send a clear message that Canada is not a safe haven for animal import violations by strengthening enforcement and penalties for animal import and testing violations 

• Adopt regulations banning the importation of all primates for biomedical testing 

• Implement incentives for researchers to move from animal models to new technologies.

Quotes

“The COVID-19 and HIV pandemics have taught us the importance of remaining vigilant about the transmission of zoonotic pathogens to humans,” said Dr. Michael Schillaci, PhD, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “US Fish and Wildlife Service and Department of Justice authorities are investigating primate importers for allegedly illegally importing wild-caught macaque monkeys from Cambodia. The importers remain unable to prove that shipments coming into the US from Cambodia did not contain wild-caught monkeys who had been falsely labeled as captive-bred.”

“The greatest risk for zoonotic pathogens would be with wild-caught macaques,” Schillaci continued. “There are no methods for analyzing tissues, such as blood or hair, to establish with any reasonable degree of confidence which monkeys, if any, are captive-bred rather than wild-caught. The Americans seem to understand this. The Canadian government needs to protect Canadians’ public health from the zoonotic pathogens that imported exotic wildlife, such as these macaques, can carry.”

“My colleagues and I urge prime minister Justin Trudeau and environment minister Steven Guilbeault to close Quebec and Canadian skies to the trafficking of endangered monkeys for experimentation,” said Dr. Jesse Greener, PhD, a professor of chemistry at the Université Laval. “If the Trudeau government is serious about its climate and environment commitments, it must use its power to keep macaques in their natural habitat, not in Canadian laboratories.”

“Indeed, the government of Canada should be encouraging researchers to pivot to emerging technologies such as organ-on-chip, which significantly reduce ethical considerations while producing more reliable results,” Greener concluded.

Quick Facts

More than 10,000 long-tailed macaques were imported into Canada  from Cambodia between January 2020 and July 2024.

Long-tailed macaques are the most heavily traded species of primate for use in biomedical experimentation and in 2022, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) elevated them to “Endangered.” Their extraction from the wild for use in experimentation was cited as one of the factors leading to their dramatic population declines since the 1990s.

A macaque in the forests, temples, or villages of Asia is not a significant infectious threat to humans and in fact plays a crucial role as a buffer in these complex ecosystems. But when those monkeys are caught up in the experimentation pipeline, not only do they suffer in unspeakable ways, they also become significant infectious disease threats.

In early 2023, Charles River Laboratories, the self-described largest importer of monkeys in the world, had multiple shipments of long-tailed macaques denied clearance by United States (US) Fish and Wildlife authorities when the company was unable to prove that these animals, imported from Cambodia, were not illegally captured from the wild and falsely labeled as captive-bred on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) permits that accompanied them to the US.

US Fish and Wildlife authorities instituted a de facto ban on importation of Cambodian-origin macaques in early 2023 and since then Charles River Labs has pivoted to importing Cambodian-origin macaques to Canada instead.

Breeding captive long-tailed macaques doesn’t produce enough monkeys to meet the experimenters’ demand. This has led to a deadly trade in wild-caught monkeys in which entire troops of macaques are targeted in vicious trapping schemes. Macaques destined for Canada are boxed up at monkey factory farms like Charles River’s supplier K-F Cambodia. Diseases are common at these facilities. Many of the monkeys die or are injured in the crowded, filthy, and barren cages.  

my post-election venting copied from facebook

This post says nothing new or original or the slightest bit interesting. I just want to preserve what I've been posting on Facebook* over the last week.

I'm going in order of posting, rather than the reverse-chrono of blogging and social media. Also not including likes and comments, as those use full names.

* Yep, I'm old.

rtod: "what makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed"

Revolutionary thought of the day:

"What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

Hannah Arendt, 1974 interview

u.s. voting, "trump is a symptom," genocide, and reality: further thoughts

image: self-righteousness and left activism

Yesterday I wrote about, among other things, why Americans should vote Democrat despite their very obvious shortcomings, blindspots, corrupt partisanship, militarism, support for the Israeli apartheid regime... and so on.

The reason is simple. Life will be substantially worse for ordinary people under another Trump presidency.

Life for workers will be worse.

Life for most women will be worse.

Life for most people of colour will be worse.

Life for all transgender people will be worse.

What little is left of US democracy may well be revoked.

The courts will be more biased than they are now. Justice will be less accessible than it is now.

It will be open season for bigtory of all types -- racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, and especially transphobia. Even more than it is now.

There will be no progress on gun-law reform -- and there will be no possibility of progress on gun reform. This means that children will continue to die. Teachers will continue to die. Americans will continue to be slaughtered by their fellow citizens who have unfettered access to assault weapons. Parents will continue to live in fear that every day their children go to school, they may not return, or may live through unspeakable trauma. 

There will be zero progress on climate change, and zero possibility of progress.

A convicted felon and a rapist will be President of the United States. Almost every POTUS has been a war criminal. That doesn't in any way negate, balance, or validate putting a convicted felon in the White House.

My socialist comrades -- or people who I once regarded as comrades -- are correct about many things. Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Harris will enable genocide and other horrors. True and true. But when I hear that there is no real difference between a Trump presidency and a Harris presidency, I can only believe they are full of shit. And I must conclude that they are putting their high-minded principles, and perhaps their self-image, ahead of basic empathy and compassion. 

I wonder if leftist Canadians who are so adamant about the need to vote for neither Harris nor Trump have actually tried to imagine what it would be like for themselves and their loved ones living in the US under another Trump presidency. If they have, and still hold this belief, they are fools. If they have not, they are dangerously deficient in empathy.

American lives are not more important than Palestinian lives. Neither are they less important.

If this makes me less purely leftist, less socialist, less whatever-the-fuck, than these self-righteous revolutionaries, I couldn't give a fuck, and perhaps I should be glad.

elections: here some relief, there... only fear

I rarely -- almost never -- write about politics anymore, either Canadian or US. But of course the upcoming US election is weighing heavily on my mind, as it surely is on yours. 

Good, sane people everywhere can only watch in horror and disbelief as the US becomes increasingly bizarre and unhinged. We've all run out of adjectives. It is simply surreal. 

Why I still vote NDP

I had another election on my mind, too. There was a provincial election in BC: the incumbent progressive NDP trying to fend off a Conservative surge. 

There's a lot of anger against the NDP government, most of it based on ignorance and lies from the right, and magical thinking from the left. As governments go, the BC NDP government was as good as it gets. They've been focused on improving life for ordinary Canadians in ways that make a real difference -- healthcare, childcare, housing. 

Their part in the criminalization of the Wet'suwet'en land defenders is very troubling. The pipeline blockaded by land defenders was approved by the elected Wet'suwet'en council, but is opposed by the hereditary chiefs. Amnesty, environmental groups, and many Indigenous allies see this as an end-run around the principles and intent of DRIPA.

It's true that the elected councils are vestiges of colonialism, brought in by the Indian Act. However, they exist, and the Nations elect them. Should we discount elected councils and chiefs because of their origins? Do we have the right to do that -- or are we conveniently siding with the view of the Indigenous people who we agree with? I'm not sure. Whatever the answer to this complicated question, no sitting government will allow a blockade to continue, and no sitting government, of any party, will say no to a pipeline.

Similarly, the BC NDP walks an impossible balance: being too pro-logging for environmentalists, and being too green for the industries (and workers) who would cut down every tree, extract every living creature from the ocean, and uproot every acre of earth in service of short-term jobs and profits. A party that doesn't support logging in BC will never form the government.

I'd rather have a government that allows controlled logging, and also strengthens public healthcare, builds housing, creates affordable childcare, raises wages, and supports workers than a government that allows uncontrolled logging and privatizes everything. The pipeline and the logging is a given. The rest of it is up for grabs. 

A nail-biter

It was a wild election, with some ridings needing automatic recounts and others decided by absentee ballots. The NDP formed the government with the minimum number of seats needed for a majority. The Greens won two seats; with proportional representation, they would have won eight. Our own MLA (provincial representative) lost, the riding flipping to Conservative, which is unsurprising. But most importantly, we escaped the orgy of privatization and cutbacks that would have followed a Conservative win.

US-style Canadian trolls are already trying to manufacture doubt about the outcome, accusing Elections BC of all kinds of malfeasance. 

American insanity, and some leftist insanity, too

About the US election, what is there to say? The anxiety and fear of good-hearted, right-thinking Americans is justifiably soaring. What will happen if Trump wins -- and what will happen if he loses? Fascists are making death threats against election workers and their families. Fascists with a higher level of education have hundreds of lawsuits ready to drop, to slow and attempt to invalidate results. I assume wmtc readers know about this, but just in case, a primer: Republican Party efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election.

One sad and infuriating bit, for me, is the response of many leftists, exhorting people to not vote for Harris, because the Democrats, like the Republicans, support the ongoing genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

I find this by turns infuriating and depressing.

US foreign policy does not change. There is no "cut the military budget" party. No "stop supporting dictators" party. No "break ties with Israel" party. Trump's love of dictators in Russia and North Korea is only a new variation of the long history of US support for (and often installation of) dictators the world over. Neither party will stop that vile madness.

But to say there will be no difference between a Harris presidency and a Trump presidency is wildly disingenuous, incredibly ignorant, and unforgiveably callous. The socialist activists I know who exhort US voters to shun both parties fall into the third category. 

A Facebook contact recently explained a bit of this thinking: they said that Trump is a symptom, not the disease. I agree. But what do we normally do with symptoms of diseases that have no imminent cure? Do we refuse to treat them, allow people to wither and die, because the disease itself cannot be cured? 

I've heard versions of this all my life. Don't donate to food banks because it allows governments to not provide adequate supports. Don't work with grassroots groups facilitating abortion access, or helping rape victims, don't teach people who didn't finish high school, because those things "let governments off the hook". 

Choosing to help people who have been fucked over by capitalism and patriarchy doesn't preclude working to change those conditions. Can a person who needs to terminate a pregnancy wait for their state to pass better laws? Should we let families suffer from hunger and malnutrition until we achieve a more just and caring society? 

Sure, Trump is a symptom. When looked at through a socialist lens, everything that's wrong with our world is a symptom. And we need to treat the symptom to the best of our very limited ability.

I had to unfollow some really smart, interesting, and engaged socialist activists, because I can no longer bear this peculiarly leftist brand of bothsiding. Right-wing cruelty is on display every day. I expect it from them. This left-wing cruelty is infuriating and heartbreaking.  

Hypocrisy? Not really and who cares

I voted Democrat in 1992, and for a third party in 1996 and 2000. My vote was of no consequence, thanks to the US system, and I was free to not vote for a party I despised. Those who blamed third-party voting for the debacle of the 2000 election are either short-sighted, misinformed, or party hacks.

In 2004 I voted Democrat. I hated the Dems as much as I ever did, but I felt the popular vote count might be important. Turns out it was not, thanks again to the Dems themselves.

That was the last time I voted in a US election.

If I still lived in the US, I would absolutely vote Democrat now. This, and I stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and am horrified and grieving over Israel's extermination of the Indigenous population. I would vote Democrat because it is an emergency.

In her acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Kamala Harris uttered the words "the rights of the Palestinian people". I have never heard a POTUS candidate say that before. Just words, of course -- but words we could try to build on. Not voting Democrat will not help the Palestinian people, but the harm that choice could bring is unfathomable.

As we hold our collective breath: I want to cry tears of joy

On August 1 of this year, I posted this on Facebook. 

It's been 20 years since I last voted in the US and my disgust at the DNC and my feelings about the sham democracy are well documented. But the idea of a brown woman being POTUS thrills me and I will cry tears of joy when she is elected. Just as I did when Obama was elected, even though I knew who he truly was and what his election would (and wouldn't) bring. The US is the US. I'm not expecting anything other. But I want Harris to fucking kick that felon's butt. I want to see a fucking landslide, a decisive victory. I want to cry at her inauguration.

foot pain, swimming, push-ups, and roast chicken: four things going on with me

I haven't written one of these silly personal posts in a while, and things are piling up. As I always say, I write this blog for myself, and I have some things to record.

Foot pain. I've been beset with crazy pain in my feet. I ignored it for months, continuing to walk 20-25 kms each week, while the pain worsened. New orthotics, proper shoes, but the pain worsened and became inescapable. Finally I went back to the podiatrist -- no small thing, as it means taking a full day off work, arranging dog care, a long day of driving. Diagnosis: peroneal tendonitis. Apparently, this is a thing. Who knew.

Quite sure my technique does not look like this.

I'm trying my best to not freak out. Walking is my principal form of exercise, and if I can't walk... what will happen to my health, and my quality of life? So I'm working hard to stay in the present and not think too far ahead.

Lots to do and not do. Resting my feet as much as possible -- no long dog-walks, no treadmill. Icing. Wearing compression sleeves. Getting physio and doing foot stretches and strengthening exercises. 

And... finding ways to get exercise that doesn't stress my feet.

Swimming again. There's always a silver lining: my foot pain led me back to the pool. I haven't been swimming since before covid. Our pool has a weekly, "sensory-friendly" swim which is perfect for me. I've been going every week and it's starting to feel great. I'm planning on adding an aquafit class on a separate day.

But my chicken did look like this!

Strength and flexibility. I had also really fallen off my strengthening and stretching, and the extended break from the treadmill has led me back to that, too. I found a YouTuber I like a lot, treated myself to the paid, ad-free level, and have been doing standing or sitting workouts, which are still quite challenging. 

Proof: for the first time ever, I did a full, non-modified push-up. It's been a personal goal of mine that I was never able to achieve, until now. 

Still, I am very much hoping to resolve the peroneal tendonitis and be able to walk for extended times again, at least rotating with pool time.

Roast chicken. I love roast chicken and have always been intimidated to make it myself. There are so many techniques, so much advice, I assumed it was difficult and complicated. Then I stumbled on Mark Bittman's roast chicken recipe, which sounded incredibly simple and delicious. I bought a cast-iron skillet, the first I've ever owned, and a pasture-raised, organic chicken. It was incredibly easy, and so delicious: crispy on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside. Next time I'll put a bunch of little potatoes under the chicken and I'll be even happier.

Mark Bittman's roast chicken (unlocked)

Fabulous Fifties on YouTube

AskDrJo on YouTube

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times: a tale of one library manager on two consecutive days

This started out as a "things i heard at the library" post, but it got too complicated. Instead, it's a story about my life as the manager of a public library in a high-risk community.

First we heard about Georgie

Headed to a library near you.

Earlier this week, we learned that a regular customer of ours, someone we saw every day without fail, was killed. Murdered. We regularly hear of substance-use-related deaths, and suicides, and deaths from general poor health. But this was the first time in my experience in Port Hardy that we heard about a homicide.

The man who was killed was a sweet, kind, quiet person. He didn't have housing and lived at the local Salvation Army shelter. He was a regular at the community puzzle table. When he first appeared in the branch, he was very withdrawn and sat in a corner by himself. One of our staff took it upon herself to slowly, gradually, quietly bring him into the library community.

The news that he had been killed was truly shocking and heartbreaking. But I can't be heartbroken at work. If I'm heartbroken at work, I can't do my job. So I save my heartbreak for when I'm home, by myself. And in this way, my work unintentionally comes home with me. 

I also realize the same is true for my staff, and it's my job to support them and offer resources if they need them. So also in this way, my work follows me home.

Then we dealt with the retraumatization, and probably toxic drugs

The following day, someone came up to the info desk, spoke a few incoherent words, sat down on the floor, then collapsed. Kneeling beside her, staff first asked another team member to call an outreach worker, then changed her mind and asked her to call 911. While that was going on, two more people entered the branch, both staggering and incoherent. Both sat down, then passed out. Within an hour, four separate ambulances took away a total of seven people.

Things calmed down after that. Later in the day -- right before the start of a program -- another person collapsed, another ambulance called. That brought us to five calls and eight people, breaking the previous record.

We can only assume this was at least partly a response to Georgie's death, which triggered a wave of retraumatization. Adding to that, several area drug dealers are now incarcerated, which means that people are buying from new dealers, a new supply, so they cannot judge the dosage, and there may be fentanyl or other toxic substances in the mix. 

Everyone survived. We are grateful for that.

In between, a program

The program went off as planned: "Good Health Starts at the Supermarket". A registered dietician from the public health office gave a presentation on how to "shop healthy". We had draw prizes of grocery gift cards, and a bag of healthy groceries. Ten people attended, and the prize winners -- low income people themselves -- shared with the others. 

I organized this program, which is part of what I do. Incidentally, and importantly, it was one of the very few programs attended by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous library customers. That was very gratifying.

While the program was going on, I attended (virtually) a Board meeting of the Mt Waddington Family Literacy Society, of which I am now co-chair.

The next day, building community connections to combat racism

The following day, I co-chaired a steering-committee meeting of the Welcoming Communities Coalition of North Vancouver Island. The Coalition is dedicated to reducing and eliminating barriers to newcomers' full participation in our communities, with a focus on antiracism.

Our North Island communities have become the landing place for a large number of newcomers to Canada. These folks, all of whom have arranged employment, are needed and should be welcomed into our towns, but of course that is not always their experience. 

Being a newcomer is not easy, but I cannot imagine how much more difficult it is made by small-town, remote-community life. When the Immigrant Welcome Centre opened an office in this region, I decided to make newcomers an intentional focus of my library branches.

Connecting with the Immigrant Welcome Centre, I also found the Welcoming Communities Coalition, which is part of the IWC, but not involved in direct service provision. One thing led to another, and I became the co-chair of the Welcoming Communities Coalition steering committee on North Vancouver Island. 

Through connections I have made during my work here, I was able to invite others to the table -- people who can greatly help move our work forward. These connections are indeed my greatest contribution to this work.  

At this recent meeting (which I organized), I truly felt the power and potential of forging and cultivating community connections. The people I invited will become the key players at making our efforts successful. I say this not to pat myself on the back or to win praise. I say it with a sense of wonder and much joy that I have come so far, and that I have shaped my work in this way. It is deeply satisfying.

The folks on the steering committee are seasoned, realistic activists and advocates. We know we will not eliminate racism in our communities. However, we will:

- organize events designed to celebrate diversity and promote cultural exchange,

- educate residents about racism and antiracism,

- connect newcomers with resources,

- encourage and facilitate the reporting of hate crimes and racist actions,

- help newcomers understand the specific cultural context of our communities, especially relationships with Indigenous communities, 

- educate people about human rights, and

- take a visible stand against racism and invite everyone in our communities to do so with us.

What else I'm up to

This is a window into my working life. I'm also interviewing and hiring new staff, overseeing and supporting the work of frontline workers, overseeing five facilities, giving presentations to community groups, designing programs, and plowing through a small mountain of paperwork. And hopefully soon, helping my union bargain our next contract. 

what i'm reading: the wolf, outstanding nonfiction by nate blakeslee

current/international edition

The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee is a masterpiece. It is truly one of the best works of narrative nonfiction that I've read.  (The book is also published under the title American Wolf, with the same subtitle.) 

This book had been on my radar since it was published in 2017, and I found a used hardcover at Powell's this year. I was almost afraid to read it, as I thought it might be too sad. Now I'm so glad I didn't let that stop me (and it shouldn't stop you).

Blakeslee's earlier book, Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town has been on my List even longer; it was published in 2006. Now I will be sure to move it up in the queue.

original cover

I scarcely know how to write about a book that enthralls me like The Wolf has. It is a page-turner, with exciting, vivid scenes of wild nature unfolding before your eyes. It is also an education on how that wild nature is hostage to humans, and how humans are hostage to politics. And it is a view into a human community that has grown around a deep love of the wild, and an obsessive desire to be close to it and protect it.

Blakeslee weaves these threads together in a gripping tale. You could almost call it a multigenerational family saga -- both the generations of wolf families, and their enemies, the humans who are aligned against them.

You know I love and am deeply fascinated by wolves. So yeah, I'm primed to love this book. But my interest is also why I'm extremely discriminating in what I'll read on this subject. I stick to the big names in the field and can't be bothered with the mundane. That's why I can confidently praise this book so highly. 

There is heartbreak. You have to know that going in. Towards the end, I was weeping, and I'm sure you will be, too. But it's not the horror of animal cruelty, which I cannot read about and very much avoid. It's the heartbreak of losing a character that you have come to know, respect, and revere. Blakeslee also brings you the meaning that arose from that heartbreak, and there is comfort in that. There are also happy endings, too -- and if not happy, then positive and satisfying.

If you love and value the bits of wild that are left on our planet -- and if you believe that we humans must steward those wild places -- I recommend this book. Also, if you simply love to read good books: this is one.

how new york city is like a polar bear, or what i'm reading: three books about the death murder of north american cities

I knew these books would break my heart. 

I chose three books from my List, all on the same topic: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, by P. E. Moskowitz, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman, and Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost its Soul, by Jeremiah Moss. 

With my heart duly broken, in mourning for New York City and all it means, I've been trying to write this post for weeks. I hardly know where to begin.

Gentrification doesn't begin to describe

The phenomenon described in these books is usually called gentrification, but that process -- how it is commonly conceived -- does not convey the sinister, soul-crushing shift that has erased the lifeblood of major cities all over North America, and apparently, the world.

The two cities most emblematic of this change are New York and San Francisco. This makes sense, as historically both have been the chosen homes of creative and nonconformist people from all over the US, and both possess some of the most valuable real estate in the country. But no North American city has been immune to this, from Toronto to Austin, from Detroit to Atlanta, from Portland, Oregon to Burlington, Vermont.

Gentrification is too mild a word. Call it hyper-gentrification, homogenization, suburbanization. Disneyfication. The authors of these three books use those words -- and those were the words we, too, were using in 1990s New York.

I felt the trend of deadly homogenization keenly through the 1990s and in the early 2000s. The progress of that shift was part of what propelled me to leave New York in 2005 -- and if we had a viable plan, we might have left several years earlier. In a sense, this is the same sensitivity that had us feeling the rightward shift in the US, and the encroaching end of reproductive rights, before the mainstream seemed to catch on.

In 2004, as I was just beginning this blog, I wrote: 

I've been ready to leave New York for a while. The incessant homogenization is really getting me down: all the chain stores, theme restaurants, the Upper West Side looking like Chelsea looking like Park Slope. It's something I've been complaining about since the late 80s, and it's only gotten worse and worse. NYC has lost so much uniqueness, so much character; it feels too much like anyplace USA. I find it very sad. A friend called it soul-destroying, and that's precisely right.

Although we were highly sensitized to this shift, I now realize we ourselves were among the earliest wave of gentrification -- the creative "pioneer" phase -- in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of upper Manhattan. I now hear those words in a different light: P. E. Moskowitz notes how the language of gentrification mimics the language of colonization, and how fitting that is, as both displace people and cultures.

Not to be confused with nostalgia

This is not simple nostalgia. It's not "things were better back in my day". It's a fundamental shift in the city's character, and it's driven principally by two things: a lack of affordable housing, and the absence of commercial rent control. These two factors are themselves caused by a web of root causes from the banking industry, real estate developers (and the governments that protect both), and one of the most egregious of all: rezoning.

Thousands -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands -- of working-class people can no longer afford to live in the cities. They are forced into the suburbs or exurbs, where they are have longer and more expensive commutes, where they are isolated, where they lose their communities, lose services.

The ethnic communities that have formed organically in response to waves of immigration are replaced by people who can afford the out-sized rents, and whose expectations and demands align with privilege and luxury.

Creatives can no longer afford to live in cities. Music, art, theatre, acting, and all manner of creative thinking -- typically supported by having free time outside of one's "day job" or "survival job," because of relatively inexpensive living situations -- becomes impossible for all but the highly privileged. The very reason that so many millions have flocked to cities -- to create, to be themselves, to create themselves -- becomes impossible. 

Exorbitant rents plus the shuttering of locally-owned neighbourhood businesses, replaced with national chains (the only companies that can afford the spaces) kills communities, and with it, the character of the city. 

The city loses the very thing that made it itself. 

This is not the natural order of things

New York City, to be sure, was always a playground for the rich. Ultra-expensive restaurants, luxury ticket prices, fundraising galas for the elite who support expensive arts and culture -- this has always been an integral part of the city. But parallel to that world were countless others -- cheap eats, theatre of every price and for every taste, poetry slams, underground art scenes, cheap clothing stores, used bookstores, dive bars. Lots and lots of free or cheap stuff. Gone, gone, gone. Distinct neighbourhoods with distinct personalities. Gone. gone. gone.

What makes a city vibrant and interesting, what gives it character, what leaves it open to discovery, depends on the diversity and the creativity of the populace, and a city where they can carve out an area to do so.

Finding pockets of affordable housing (often by living with a large number of roommates), inexpensive food, spaces where creative people can congregate -- be they tiny off-off-Broadway theatres, open-mic comedy nights, neighbourhood restaurants, food trucks, free museum nights, and a menu of options for supporting oneself -- waiting tables, tending bar, office "temping"  -- this is why creatives flock to cities. This is why people without huge amounts of discretionary income can thrive in them, giving cities character, making them more interesting -- which in turn bolster the city's economy. 

Without anything resembling affordable housing, none of this can happen.

Three books in brief

Of these three books, Sarah Schulman offers the most original concept and the most challenging read. Schulman offers a unique and fascinating thesis about the AIDS epidemic being an agent of gentrification, permanently altering New York's queer community, and decimating activism among low-income people. 

From the introduction to The Gentrification of the Mind.

On the way home, these images were reeling in my mind. The truth of complexity, empowerment, the agency of the oppressed, replaced by an acceptance of banality, a concept of self based falsely in passivity, an inability to realize oneself as a powerful instigator and agent of profound social change.

What is this process? What is this thing that homogenizes complexity, difference, dynamic dialogic action for change and replaces it with sameness? With a kind of institutionalization of culture? With a lack of demand on the powers that be? With containment?

My answer to that question, always came back to the same concept: gentrification.

. . . To me, the literal experience of gentrification is a concrete replacement process. Physically it is an urban phenomena: the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from the central neighborhoods of cities, and their replacement by more homogenized groups. With this comes the destruction of  culture and relationship, and this destruction has profound consequences of the future lives of cities.

But in the case of my particular question, while literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.

P. E. Moskowitz looks at four cities -- Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York -- and illustrates how hyper-gentrification has altered each city -- and how it happened. He digs down to reveal root causes, making visible a process that is thought to be inevitable, but is actually intentionally created by humans, for their own power and profit.

From How to Kill a City.

The Michael Bloomberg administration rezoned large swaths of the city, mostly from industrial and commercial to high density residential. Developers were given free rein in these newly zoned areas. Most buildings were not required to provide any affordable housing, and in those that were, their percentages were low enough, and the definition of "affordable" loose enough, that they made virtually no impact.

And so multimillion dollar condos fronted by twisted blue and green frosted glass have sprouted in Chelsea, in Midtown, and along every other corridor where the city has allowed height limits to be raised and zoning to be changed. Given the height of these buildings you'd think street life in West Chelsea would be busy, but the neighborhood is still largely a dead zone. And that's because these buildings, like many in New York nowadays, are not so much places to live as places for capital to grow.

Entire neighborhoods are becoming stash pads for the global elite who see real estate as a safer investment than the stock market. Often very few people are really living in these buildings, except for maybe a month or two out of the year. Chelsea is not even the worst: a New York Times investigation found that on a single three-block stretch in Midtown, 57 percent of apartments are vacant for at least 10 months each year. Absentee home ownership has grown by 70 percent in Manhattan since 2000. Even if you believe that attracting billionaires to New York is a good idea, it's hard to understand why these apartments are assessed at rates of one one-hundredth of what they are worth. Because of New York's tax code, a $100 million apartment in one of these new, super-tall glass buildings is usually only taxed as if it were worth $3 million or $4 million. Even mayor Bloomberg's more progressive successor, Bill de Blasio, has done little to change this status quo. . . . 

I walk along tree-lined 11th Street (one of the prettiest streets in New York, if you ask me me), past Magnolia Bakery, where dozens of tourists perpetually stand outside to partake in their own personal recreations of a Sex and the City episode that aired nearly 20 years ago. I hit 7th Avenue and in front of me is Saint Vincent's, or what used to be Saint Vincent's -- the neighborhood hospital that everyone in my family made use of at least once. It closed down to make room for a condo development that now takes up the entire block and where apartments go for $20 million. Down the block was a good vegetarian Chinese restaurant that recently closed when its rent was raised from $5,000 to $25,000 a month.

Continuing on 11th Street, I hit Sixth Avenue and then Union Square. One of the only open, European-style plazas in the entire city, Union Square was well on its way to being gentrified when I was growing up, but now it is essentially a shopping mall. If you've never been there, imagine a big town square like a piazza in Italy, but instead of government buildings and stately architecture flanking each side, there are stores: DSW and Walgreen's and Nordstrom Rack and Best Buy, to name a few. It's a hyper-capitalist's version of a stately plaza. This area did not naturally evolve to become an outdoor shopping mall. It took concerted effort. 

During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Union Square was a site for protest and a gathering spot for New York's art scene. Andy Warhol's Factory was nearby, as were famous nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City. But after New York City went bankrupt in the 1970s, a consortium of business leaders, including the Chairman of the Board of Con Edison (New York's main electric company), proposed redeveloping Union Square as an essentially private enterprise. A Business Improvement District, or BID, took over Union Square, replacing city control. 

BIDs aren't unique to New York but they wield a lot of power here. Business Improvement Districts in New York often do the work that a robust city government would do on its own, planning streetscapes, cleaning up trash, and policing the area. But a BID's employees are nonunion workers and get paid low wages, and BID have no special laws governing them, meaning they cannot be held accountable to voters/citizens in the same way that a government agency theoretically could be. The BIDs are accountable to no one except the neighborhood businesses that provide 100% of their funding. Member voting rights in a BID are assigned to each business based on that businesses land value. 

Today, Union Square is often blocked off by BID sponsored barricades, it's grassy areas protected with BID-approved netting, its security and clean-up paid for by the BID. Sure, thanks to the BID, Union Square is less dirty than it once was, but it's also no longer a public square in any true sense. "We're constantly trying to attract a specific demographic: young, moneyed consumers who know New York City from New York magazine... and who watch 'Friends'," a spokesperson for Union Square BID once said. "We can train these young consumers to think of urban living on Union Square." 

Harlem's 125th Street "revitalization" has a similar story: a cabal of development-friendly nonprofits has worked to bring in chain stores and luxury housing. Meanwhile, the media report on the "new" Harlem as if its progression to luxury and whiteness is somehow natural.

The best and most painful of the these books is Vanishing New York, by Jeremiah Moss, a pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury. As Moss, Hansbury wrote the long-running blog "Jeremiah's Vanishing New York", which became a hub for the rage and sadness that so many New Yorkers feel at the destruction of our city. Of course that includes former New Yorkers -- because once you are, you are. 

I loved Moss' introduction to Vanishing New York. I tried to get his permission to reprint it, but never heard back, so I'm restraining myself in sharing only a portion.

Reports of New York's death are not greatly exaggerated, though some would argue otherwise, insisting that the city's undomesticated heart still beats in far-off corners of Brooklyn and the Bronx, that you'll find a faint pulse in whitewashed Manhattan if you look hard enough. These insistent optimists, deep into denial, point to any trace of the Old Town and say, "There is New York." Yes, there it is. But it's only a remnant, a lone survivor from an endangered species rapidly vanishing. Maybe it's that dive bar with the Ramones on the jukebox, or that bookshop with a cat lounging atop stacks, or the rare sighting of a transgender outlaw walking some West Village street in platform heels. It's like finding a polar bear, sweating on her melting chunk of iceberg, and then denying that the world is cooked because, hey, there's a polar bear. 

Others quote from the long history of doomsayers, the many writers who declared the city dead. "The complaint that the real soul of Manhattan has already expired is a long-standing one -- perhaps as old as 19th century Knickerbockers pining for a mythological Dutch past," writes Bryan Waterman in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York. That's true. But has the complaint ever been made by so many, so relentlessly, and with such passionate certainty as it is today -- and with so much evidence to back it up?

Novelist Caleb Carr called the massive change to the 21st Century city a "regrettable, soul-sucking transformation." Patti Smith told us to "find a new city" because "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling." David Byrne wrote an essay on the cultural death of New York saying, "Most of Manhattan and many parts of Brooklyn are virtual walled communities, pleasure domes for the rich." Essayist David Rakoff observed how "the town's vibrancy and authenticity" have been "replaced by a culture-free, high-end retail clusterfuck of luxury condo buildings." 

Responding to all this, the counter argument goes: but it's safer! The streets are clean! And we have great restaurants! In the New Yorker Adam Gopnik summed it up: "New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a facelift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. . . . For the first time in Manhattan's history, it has no bohemian frontier." 

I could go on with pages of similar quotes, all from the past decade or so, a chorus of voices from literature, art, new media, journalism, all making the same argument: at the beginning of the 21st Century, the city changed in what felt like an instant, and the change wasn't good. In short, New York has lost its soul. The place is dead. OK, "dead" might be hyperbolic. Is "dying" a better word? How about "comatose," awaiting a miraculous revival? Maybe this shift is just another phase in the city's long and ever-changing evolution. But who ever thought New York would have a soulless period?

If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: hyper-gentrification and its free market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather, I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed. 

How did such a catastrophe befall the greatest city on earth? It didn't happen all at once. After decades of scheming on the part of urban elites -- the real estate magnates, financiers, planners, and politicians -- who worked tirelessly to take the city from those they considered "undesirables," mayor Ed Koch really got the ball rolling in the 1980s. Rudy Giuliani brought the muscle in the 1990s. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 played a pivotal role. And then after the turn of the millennium, Mike Bloomberg dealt the death blow, a stunning coup de grace. Gentrification morphed into hyper-gentrification. Mainstream young people flooded in from the suburbs where their white-flighty grandparents had fled years ago. They came in droves, many of them (not all) armed with a sense of manifest destiny, helping to turn New York into a sanitized vertical suburbia. They carry a share of blame, the new arrivals who say they love New York, yet celebrate the city's makeover into an image of their Maple Valleys and Prairievilles, their Springfields and Massapequas, complete with hundreds upon hundreds of chains: Starbucks and 7-Elevens, Applebee's and Olive Gardens, Home Depots, Targets, IHOPs, Dunkin' Donuts and -- God help us -- Denny's. While it's true you can still find a pulse, here and there, along the thickly settled stretch of Manhattan, and that the city's soul still haunts pockets of the outer pockets of the outer boroughs, this book is not a Baedeker to those pockets. . . . 

This is not unique to New York. Hyper-gentrification, the term I use for the force that drives the city's undoing -- gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism -- is a global pandemic, a seemingly unstoppable virus attacking much of the world. San Francisco is dying, maybe even faster than New York. You see it in Portland and Seattle. Austin and Boston. Paris, London, Barcelona, and Berlin have all been infected. The virus has spread as far as Tel Aviv, Beirut, Seoul, and Shanghai. And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture. While I speak to the global issues in this book, New York is my case study. It may be chauvinistic to say New York is the world's capital city, but New Yorkers are chauvinistic. 

 This is also from the introduction, out of order, but a very fitting conclusion.

We all have our own lost city. If we stick around long enough, we lose the city of our youth, our dreams and foiled ambitions. Joseph Mitchell, great chronicler of Gotham, wrote, "I used to feel very much at home in New York City. I wasn't born here, I wasn't a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn't belong here anymore." I could say the same today, but this book isn't about how we all lose our personal city. It's about how the city has been taken from us. It's not just the story of a death; it's the story of a murder.

what i'm reading: three retellings of classics: julia (1984), james (huckleberry finn), finn (huckleberry finn)

When I first heard about Julia, Sandra Newman's retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from Julia's perspective, I wasn't sure I would read it. Orwell is one of my very top writers, and 1984 is, for me, a foundational work. It's one of the few books I've read multiple times, and every time I read it, I find more in it. Did I want to revisit it with another author? Knowing that the Orwell estate approved Newman's use of the original, and being drawn to the words "feminist retelling," I decided I would.

I would have been foolish to skip it. Julia is a gripping, suspenseful, devastating look at women's lives under a totalitarian state. It intersects with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (more the brilliant TV series than the book) and some other dystopian novels, and is simultaneously true to the Orwell masterpiece.

Julia is, in a sense, more fully fleshed out than 1984. Sandra Newman has a huge body of dystopian work in which to situate Julia. In Orwell's day, there was no genre called "dystopian fiction". Not that there weren't other dystopian novels -- this page from Miami Dade College has a good overview of earlier works, many now obscure. But dystopian fiction was not the cluttered field it is now, with at least a dozen subgenres, and hundreds of forgettable, derivative knock-offs.

1984 is dystopian in the sense that The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders are YA novels. They can be thought of as proto-genre, or the grandparents of the modern genre. So reading Julia post Hunger Games and Divergent and Uglies and and and and... has a wholly different effect and impact.

More importantly, Julia explores what is absent from 1984: the plight of women in the totalitarian (or simply authoritarian) state: the control of our reproduction. Much of it already exists, in the U.S. and in dictatorships and fake democracies around the world, and the details that might not exist are merely extrapolation. Similarly, Julia also makes the reader reckon with the features of Orwell's dark future that have come to pass -- the surveillience state, the re-writing of history. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Newman, writing now, can more fully connect our world to this future dystopia. How did we get here? What opportunity is there to re-write the future? Is it too late? Delving into Julia's childhood offers some possible answers.

The climactic chapter of this book is one of the most page-turning, pulse-pounding sequences I've ever read. Granted, most of my reading is not of the pulse-pounding variety, but the penultimate scenes left me gasping.

I highly recommend Julia, but if you haven't read 1984, I hope you will do that first. 

James

Coincidentally, I read James immediately before reading Julia. James is a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved person who has escaped his bondage and is on the run with Huck.

This novel, too, is devastating. It brings you so close to the horrifying reality of chattel slavery that at times it is painful to read. Where it differs from Julia, however, is that it is also devastatingly witty and downright funny. Everett employs humour to send up the idiocy of the slavers and the white world in general. This is marvelous, and brings James closer to Huckleberry Finn and Everett closer to Twain. 

Everett also offers an unexpected plot twist that aligns perfectly with some of the central themes of Twain's masterpiece. I loved this. I also recalled the themes of Russell Banks' Rule of the Bone. (Curious? Read it.)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as you may know, is often "challenged" by parents seeking to keep it out of school libraries and off class reading lists. Part of this is based on Twain's use of the word nigger throughout the book. I was pleased that Everett doesn't answer to that parochial mentality. Surely when a slaveowner is referring to his human "property," he is not going to use a polite term or a euphemism. Writing around this truth would only dilute the power of the book. 

Similarly, when referring to the sexual assaults that enslaved women (and no doubt, many men) were subjected to on a regular basis, Everett uses the word rape. Although there were one or two places where I questioned if the victims would have known that word, I was very grateful to see it there on the page, with no sugar-coating and no qualifiers. 

Finn

A few years ago, I read Finn, Jon Clinch's 2008 debut novel, the story of Huckleberry Finn's abusive, alcoholic wretch of a father. Pap (as he is called in Huck Finn) is only a minor character in Twain's book, but the abuse he visits on Huck is well known to everyone in the community, and a prinicpal motivator in Huck's "adventures". 

Who was this man? What made him so mean, so reprehensible? Why was he so awful to Huck? In Finn, Clinch imagines the answers. He creates a terrifying and wholly believable portrait of how a man is reduced to degradation. He even manages to induce a bit of sympathy in the reader. Every abuser has a trauma story of their own, and Pap is no exception.

The author doesn't defend Finn or his actions. He just imagines how he came to pass. Clinch also creates some brilliant suspense and plot twists. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Clinch followed Finn with Marley, an alternate-point-of-view of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I didn't do well with this one, but I think I may try again.

* * * *

This fiction "what i'm reading" trio is brought to you by meaningful, complex nonfictions exploring a topic of great importance to me. In other words: I am struggling mightily with another post, needed a break from it, and this was the result.

labour day reading list

Image: Ricardo Levins Morales

Last year, I created and led a labour book club through my union, the BCGEU. 

I navigated my way through multitudes of obstacles to make this happen, so I was disappointed that our local leadership chose not to continue it. Sadly, Labour Book Club was a one-off project, at least for the foreseeable future. 

It was a great experience and I'm glad I saw it through. This was our reading list. The criteria was simply fiction about labour.

The Cold Millions, Jess Walter

In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck

God's Bits of Wood, Ousmane Sembene

The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash

In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

For the Win, Cory Doctorow

Gilded Mountain, Kate Manning

Our most surprising, most challenging, and most rewarding read was God's Bits of Wood, by the Senegalese filmmaker, writer, and activist Ousmane Sembene. I had never heard of Sembene; I found the title strictly through research. 

Because it is out of copyright, God's Bits of Wood is legitimately available to read online at no cost, and I highly recommend it. It is a gripping, eye-opening, moving, and inspiring story of people organizing themselves at the intersection of labour, racism, and colonization. It is also a lightly fictionalized version of actual events that took place in 1947 Senegal, then a colony of France. The event is referred to as a "railway workers' strike" but that does not begin to describe the breadth and power of this struggle -- especially actions taken by the women, who were not themselves railway workers.

On the other end of the spectrum, I found Sometimes a Great Notion nearly unreadable. However, the others in our small group enjoyed it much more than I did. 

All the other titles are good, interesting, and worth reading if they look interesting to you.

lee zaslofsky, rest in power

This week I learned that a friend and comrade from my Toronto days has died: Lee Zaslofksy. 

Lee was a leader in the War Resisters Support Campaign, supporting men and women who refused to participate in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. For a long time, Lee was the coordinator of the network as it found housing, funds, employment, and community for war resisters coming to Canada. But "coordinator" is a shallow title that doesn't convey what Lee did; his work was much deeper and broader than coordination. Lee supplied friendship and community. He gave of himself. He showed up. He loved.

When you're involved in high-stakes activism, where your work has serious impacts on people lives, people form powerful bonds. You might know very little about someone's background or their day-to-day life, discovering bits of their story as time goes on. Sometimes you might not see or speak with each other in between meetings. Other times you'll speak five times a day. Activist comrades occupy a unique space in your life, different from an ordinary friendship. The passion of your commitment, the depth of your belief, your shared desire to move your cause forward, your deep respect for each other, creates a love that I am grateful to have experienced, more than once in my life. 

Through the War Resisters Support Campaign, I worked with people that I feel incredibly fortunate to have known, so lucky that my life intersected with theirs.

Lee was one of those people to me. Lee will always be on my list of people I am so grateful and fortunate to have known. 

I recall that we didn't always agree on everything, and sometimes differed in our visions of how to move our great project forward. We would become very heated and passionate. I recall him banging the table for emphasis -- and the next time he saw me, hugging me tightly.

Lee was a Vietnam War deserter. He had been a home healthcare aide. He had been a staffer in Jack Layton's office, when Jack was on the Toronto city council. He loved the country of Vietnam, and visited as often as he could, for long periods of time, and had boyfriends there. He was born in Brooklyn, and became a Canadian citizen as soon as he was eligible (as did I).

That might be the sum-total of what I knew about Lee's biography. But I knew much more important things: his principles, his passion for justice, his belief in human potential. His crazy sense of humour, that might elicit anything from an eye-roll to hilarity. The love that poured from him.

His death has hit us all so hard -- all the "resisters and campaigners," we used to say. Now a loose collection of people scattered around North America and beyond, some of us in touch on social media, others not at all, but our bond endures. 

Lee Zaslofsky, rest in power, my friend.

why i call kamala harris by her last name and wish you would too

Here's a question for progressive folks following the US election campaign: Why do you call Kamala Harris "Kamala" and call Tim Walz "Walz"?

* * * * 

A long time ago, way back in the late 80s, Allan and I would watch a local news broadcast together. We're talking regular TV, "the news" on three times daily -- two local broadcasts (one at 6:00, one at 10:00 or 11:00 pm), and one national broadcast.

During the sports portion of the broadcast, the sports anchor would talk about Mattingly -- Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees, Ewing -- Patrick Ewing, of the New York Knicks, and Chrissie -- tennis great Chris Evert. She wasn't Evert. She was Chrissie.

There were some pioneering broadcasters, notably on ESPN, who broke with this tradition and called female athletes by their last names, but it was unusual, and ESPN was not yet the giant it would later become.

Women's team sports, for the most part, were ignored completely. Big female sports stars were usually called by their first names. Chrissie, Martina, Steffi. Mary Lou. 

The reason for this is simple: sexism. Women's sports were not taken seriously. Calling Chris Evert Chrissie was infantilizing and disrespectful, reflecting the way women's sports were served to the public.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, women's sports grew in stature. The groundbreaking US legislation that mandated funding parity for male and female sports programs -- usually referred to as "Title 9" (Title IX) -- began to bear fruit. Young female athletes received better coaching and had more opportunities. Women's college sports became more visible and more exciting. ESPN broke new ground with a 24-hour sports-news cycle, so they needed more events to cover. That organization also had a progressive mandate to report on sports with less sexism and racism. 

I don't doubt that there are local sportscasters in Texas or Florida -- or hell, in upstate New York or rural Alberta -- that refer to Serena, Simone, or Megan, but at this point, they are likely the exceptions. Sportscasters and sportswriters routinely referring to Williams, Biles, and Rapinoe is a sign of a less sexist view of women's sports.

Can we please apply this to the political sphere?

Surely if we can refer to female athletes by their last names, we can give female candidates for the presidency of the United States the same respect?

During Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaigns, most people referred to her as Hillary. Some said this was to distinguish between Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton. Really? So during the 2016 presidential election campaign, while Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, if we heard the name Clinton, we might think someone was referring to Bill Clinton, who left public office in 2001? 

Another excuse given for calling female candidates by their first names is that we feel like we know them, we believe they are our friends, so we're on a first-name basis with them. Why, then, didn't anyone call Obama Barack? And how can this be said of a woman who so many voters and pundits despise? 

A more likely suspect is the feminist age-gap: why younger women are more likely to change their last names when they marry, why they don't mind being referred to as girls rather than women. I don't get it, but those are personal choices (although with political implications). We're talking about the professional, national, and international stage. Different standards  should apply.

Office workers are still routinely called girls and health-care workers can't seem to make it past ladies. To be clear: these workers refer to themselves and their co-workers as girls and ladies. I've worked in both of these environment (combined) for decades, and the habit seems impervious to change. Every time I hear someone refer to a group of social workers, hospital workers, library workers -- any group of women working in a predominantly female field --  as girls or ladies I want to cry or scream. Or I felt that way when I was younger. Now I just feel the sadness and resignation of defeat. 

Ladies should go the way of mulatto. Lady is not only sexist, but its roots are classist and tied to gender norms -- what was considered "ladylike", i.e. acceptable female behaviour. Someone will point out that the roots of a word are not important if the word is now used in a different context. Then why are we no longer using master bedroom and grandfathered in? Because those expresisons are rooted in slavery. The same applies to ladies, a word rooted in classism. Yet it is so prevalent I despair of it ever changing. 

We are finally seeing gender-neutral terms for various jobs become the norm: writer, actor, lawyer, doctor, athlete, politician, flight attendant, cleaner, housekeeper. Speech patterns are finally reflecting reality: people of different genders do all kinds of jobs. There is no need -- never has been a need -- to qualify a job title with --ess or lady. The job is the job. 

So why is the name not the name?

I don't expect anyone to change their speech habits after reading this post. Perhaps a writer with a wider reach can at least open up the conversation. The candidates are Trump, Vance, Harris, and Walz.