As I’ve mentioned numerous times here before, this kind of stability is something we Americans mostly don’t understand. In the past century or so we’ve been given the opportunity to be geographically mobile and a lot of us jump on that every chance we get. A few excerpts from Damaris’ post:

There is a virtue to staying where you are. There is a virtue to being where you are. Too many of us are never where we are. We live with our windows closed, shades drawn, televisions on. Our feet never feel the ground, and our skin never feels the air. While our bodies occupy a vague, in-between world, our minds are editing the past or worrying about the future . . .

This place where we are now is the only place we can meet God. God will never be in the imaginary places, the greener grass springing from our discontent, and neither will we.

The author then implores us to take a hard look at the place we’re in now. Be it high or low, noble or ignoble, and find beauty in it. There is beauty in it. “This place where we are now is the only place we can meet God. God will never be in the imaginary places, the greener grass springing from our discontent, and neither will we.”

Read the brief entry and contribute to the conversation via this link.

The only way this really relates to this blog is that the documentary is about the industrialization of the food supply, and industrialization (or mass-production) is a recurring theme on The Aesthetic Elevator. It’s interesting to me mainly because I live largely on the opposite end of the spectrum, spending a lot of time creating one-of-a-kind objects, and because it never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

The film makes certain accusations against certain companies, and in the case of at least one company whose website I visited they attempted to refute those accusations. I’m generally very skeptical when it comes to such giant bureaucracies in the first place — they’ve largely earned the distrust I have for them.

One of the examples in Food, Inc. talks about chicken farming. Northwest Arkansas, our former stomping ground, is all about growing chickens. The parents of a friend had land with three or four chicken houses. They recently sold the place on account of the exact same complications described in Food, Inc. My friend who shared with me — about four years ago now — how the contracts with companies such as Tyson work could have been in the film. The farmers end up more like indentured servants than independent contractors.

Why should I accept the refutations of the companies in the film when I’ve seen first hand the claims of the film? I don’t want to be the kind of person that has a knee-jerk reaction to every bureaucracy, but they just keep shooting themselves in the foot.

A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.

An American man got into line behind me. He had a young Latino next to him with whom he spoke fluent Spanish. Apparently the American, from what I could tell, was helping this man open or withdraw from a bank account.

Africans at a bank in the Midwest.

In this particular Wells Fargo branch there is a large antique scale. The American told the Latino to go see how much he weighed. As he went to discover that he weighed a slight 120 pounds, the man escorting him said to me under his breath, “Too many of them here. Too many of them too,” he continued while pointing to the African man in front of me. “They’re taking over.”

I had to restrain myself from replying to this blatant racism, though in my mind I formulated a response, something to the effect that “I appreciate the cultural diversity that’s come to the Midwest.” He’d just come in and I didn’t really know how much of a conversation I wanted to have in line at the bank, a conversation of that nature. So I said nothing and looked ahead.

As the line was fairly long and slow we did end up exchanging a few more words, mostly to discuss our weight, the pens in the bank which never write and how Fridays are always the busiest day to make a deposit. It became somewhat obvious this man was pretty unhappy in general, or at least liked to complain. I wondered if he was harboring some sort of bitterness that poured into all aspects of his life, including impatiently waiting in line at the bank.

I know this is a fairly common prejudicial sentiment, but what I don’t understand at all is how people get there. I grew up in a very, very Caucasian Midwestern community. There were a lot fewer Latin immigrants (legal or otherwise) then than now, and very few black people in the town.

The one black kid I remember in school, in my grade, was a bully. He was a leader and had a cadre of people around him that didn’t respect anyone else for the most part. My first life experiences with an African American were negative, and yet I’m somehow not harboring any ill feelings towards him or people of any color.

How is it then that so many Americans, perhaps particularly in the Midwest, find and foster such feelings towards people of other ethnicities? Is it thanks to media reports that talk about crime in the poorer neighborhoods where immigrants end up living? Did they have parents who instilled specific prejudices instead of compassion, respect and love for other people as themselves? Or did they have bad experiences like I did as a child that they couldn’t work through?

Last weekend my wife and I were thinking about patriotic American holidays and church. We were wondering if the patriotism often worked into Sunday morning services on or near certain holidays — which my wife and I don’t really appreciate — would be lost on someone not born in the United States. Other’s pointed out, though, that these people might have a greater appreciation for America and feel right as rain celebrating the country (in lieu of celebrating God, which is the problem we have with such services).

And this makes sense in most cases. So how do so many Americans end up so down on these people who so love their country? Isn’t it flattery for people to try and get into your country for the freedoms and opportunities it affords?

I’ve heard the arguments against immigration, so spare me your pat rhetoric in response to my deeper apolitical inquiry. And understand that I’m not condoning the illegal crossing of borders here. The man in question at the bank this afternoon should know better than to assume all or most immigrants are illegal. The Africans in line were almost certainly not illegal. They were probably refugees.

How can so many Americans have so little sense of their personal history? How can they forget so easily that this country is a country of immigrants (my sincere apologies to the Native Americans)? I’m grateful for my own family’s interest in their history. I’m glad that I’m regularly reminded by my parents and grandparents of our Danish, Swedish and German heritage. Apparently there’s a little bit of French in there too somewhere. Do other families not talk about their roots? Doesn’t someone in their clan have an affinity for genealogy?

My best guess as to why people find and foster this kind of hatred is that they’re scared. Scared of the reported crime, whether or not it’s an accurate representation of the immigrant community as a whole. Scared of losing jobs I suppose, even though we all know the immigrants generally take jobs a lot of us Americans aren’t willing to do anyway (though I suppose this economy may have changed that to a degree). Scared of the unknown.

Really I just don’t understand, as I said before. I’m not perfect. If we’re honest with ourselves we all know that we harbor some bias, some prejudice. But aren’t things like love for one’s neighbor still basic cultural values in America? Do we not hold to the truth that all men are created equal?

A few months after my wife and I got married we inherited the same little TV that occasionally hid out in mom and dad’s closet, along with a VCR that liked to eat tapes. We found that we liked to watch movies together, as so many people do. Since then we’ve upgraded to a relatively inexpensive flat panel television and a DVD player (although streaming from Hulu and Netflix via the Wii have been our preferred modes of video reception of late). We still like to watch movies together but also watch television. In fact, in the past 18 months we’ve watched a lot more television than film, mostly on DVDs. It’s much more pleasant sans the commercials, which probably doesn’t need to be said.

My wife, being female, can multitask. She knits or spins with a show on in the background. That’s harder for me to do, especially considering how much messier my chosen crafts generally are than hers. I’m usually more particular about what I watch than she is partly for this reason. I end up getting sucked into the programs, some that I don’t even like — like 24 — and that’s a giant waste of time when I could be sculpting or working on Scissortail instead. 24 is actually playing in the background as I type this entry.

There are some decent things about 24, such as the overall concept. But I don’t like the writing. 95% of the dialogue is just cheesy and often unaware of itself, and many of the characters are simply idiotic at times. The show also suffers from redundancy. Subsequent seasons are basically the same plot rehashed. A lot of shows grow old before they need to after finding a formula that works, that keeps viewers and advertisers coming back. The art, the imagination that drove the original idea, seizes up in light of the almighty dollar.

Image from Wikipedia

So why do I watch? My best guess is that it has something to do with the innate importance of story in our lives as humans. This is something that I’m just beginning to realize thanks in large part to my wife, who manages to read about 85 books a year. I barely get through five, and most of them are nonfiction.

TV, and therein story, can be more than entertainment. In my own life Bones is a good example of this. The wife began watching this show on a recommendation, as I recall, and it took me a while to get into it. The gruesome representations of human remains stuck in my head, unpleasantly, and I grew tired of the psychopaths. The show is very good though, and I’ve stuck with it. The characters are wonderful, as is the interplay between them — particularly between Booth and Bones. The dialogue is sharp and witty. And most interestingly I’ve become desensitized to the images of decomposing flesh.

Of course, such is commonly considered one of the evils of television. We see murders, we see violence and our observation presumably devalues human life. We’ll begin to emulate the actions of the characters as we continue to follow their stories.

We’ll all be emulating the corpses portrayed on Bones in some way or another (though hopefully not as murder victims dumped down a sewer drain) at some point, barring a present rapture or cremation. Or mummification, but that’s beside the point. Death is reality. Bones helped bring our human mortality to light in my life, at least in part. I’ve never been to a funeral for a person I knew, which for a person of my age seems out of the ordinary — though something to be thankful for as well — at least to me. So the reality of our finite time on Earth is a lesson I’ve had to come by through other means. In this case, through story.

What I’m wondering at the moment is this: How can we balance listening to other people’s stories, written in books or as a television series, with making or living out our own stories?

In a month we’ll be in Nashville for the Hutchmoot. The thrust of the moot will the importance of stories (from what I can tell anyway; I’m not sure there’s actually a theme). From the moot’s website:

We want you to come and enjoy a weekend of music and conversation about the stories all around us in song, film, books — and most importantly the story being told through our lives; our own story — what it means to get to the holy hidden heart of it, how to tell a better story with the days we’re given, and how our stories intersect each other’s and connect to the Great Story.

I’m grateful for the written word, for oral traditions and I’m grateful for photographic media (including video) as well. I’m glad I’m able to be a part of other people’s stories and learn from their experiences. However, at times I worry we neglect our own stories in favor of other’s.

I’m trying to figure out how to keep that from happening in my own life, how to find a balance.

We chose instead, just after graduating, to serve in mission mobilization with Mission Data International, which we’re still doing. So from the get go we had to raise money for my own fairly frugal salary. My wife became editing manager of our small town newspaper while we raised support, but she quit as we had planned when my student loans were paid off.

I don’t remember exactly what triggered the desire to seek out suburbia this week. It may have been seeing that happy family driving down the road in their newer car, combined with the chaos of moving into a very small house in neighborhood I don’t know anything about.

And now I’m wondering — not for the first time — now I’m asking the question “What is the appeal of suburbia?” Is it merely social pressure or is there more to it? Could it be there is something about the suburban space that hearkens to our subconscious? Is there something in us as humans that yearns for more open spaces (Yes, I know I’m posting this just after suggesting I miss downtown living.)? In recent years I’ve become a little less of a critic of the American suburbs, realizing we can’t just summarily do away with them and wondering, as already stated, if they came into being and proliferated with some substance beyond the greed of speculative developers.

My wife and I certainly have our reasons for intentionally standing outside of the typical pursuit of American suburbia, keyword here being pursuit. Our own interests, passions, point our time and efforts towards ends that, while still personal, attempt to look beyond our own comfort. We hope to be a counterculture for the common good. While this can be done — and should be done by people who feel called to it — in the context of the suburbs, it’s not where we’re at.

As an aside, another aspect of this week’s enigmatic desire to have a suburban life — which the wife very accurately pointed out has enough problems of its own since it’s also populated by people — might a sense of isolation I’ve had over the past few months. Working a more or less full time job away from the computer (along with still working my part-time M-DAT job mobilizing, breaking in a puppy and moving) has taken more getting used to than I expected. I miss blogging, being able to read blogs, being able to read substantial articles on the arts or theology during the week. I’m not a news junky by any stretch of the imagination, but I was disappointed to learn just this morning (in an email from M-DAT HQ) that there was a volcano disrupting air travel for mission trips. We also miss our network of artistically inclined friends back in Northwest Arkansas.

How any of this relates to a desire for a suburban life, which is typically associated with isolation itself, I don’t know. But my mind seems to want to make some kind of connection to it at the moment.

Consumerism may fight against religion. But it is commodification that disarms it. As he puts it, “When consumption becomes the dominant cultural practice, belief is systematically misdirected from traditional religious practices into consumption . . . Traditional practices of self-transformation are subordinated to consumer choice” (225) . . .

The “use” of Mother Theresa illustrates these dynamics. Her indelible image—the cracked outline of her face, a preternatural smile, tenderly touching an untouchable—gets printed on t-shirts. These t-shirts get mass-produced and worn by young Americans “inspired” by her life. They recite her words. They appeal to her work to denounce, say, two-car-garage lifestyles and the war in Iraq. And they do this while drinking Kenyan coffee and listening to “World Music” on their iPods . . . Religious materials, in short, are “thrown into a cultural marketplace where they can be embraced enthusiastically but not put into practice” (28) . . .

In Miller’s account, the story begins with Karl Marx. Marx showed how laborers were alienated from the fruits of their labors. This, in turn, led to an increased “de-skilling” of workers, who then more easily “employed” by engineers to perform tasks for which they received “wages.” In time a shift ensued in the mode of human existence from being to having. The suburban single-family home epitomized this shift. Here we had a family supported almost entirely by wages. The family, under this rubric, shifted from managing production to managing consumption. Such a family, for example, now collects “devices” in order to make their lives easier. But for Miller the result leads to increasing isolation from neighbors, who are no longer felt to be needed. Wages and benefits replace “extended family and community relationships as the source of security” (48) . . .

What advice does Miller offer the reader looking to resist assimilation to consumerism? The first task, he argues, is to name commodification as a problem. After this one can choose a number of creative activities. One can find out where their food comes — Chiquita bananas or breast of chicken. One can take up a craft and gain an appreciation for the labor costs that are involved. The liturgy, at least of the more “high” churches, can serve to reinforce the interconnections between doctrine and symbols and thus aid in the stabilization of their meanings.

After a few criticisms of Miller’s use of sociology over hard data and some hasty comments on the arts, Taylor concludes his review:

In the end, however, I was very encouraged by Miller’s book. He offered an acute picture of the dynamics of a consumerist culture. The problem is not simply that our culture produces narcissistic individuals who increasingly find themselves isolated from neighbor and nature. The problem is the way that the dynamics of commodification make it easy for us to “consume” religion.

Read Taylor’s review in full via this link.

Beer has always been popular in our country, but always in different ways. It’s an old story to discuss the recent dominance of microbreweries over macrobreweries. The shift that we’ve seen in the last few years has gone even further. Now, even microbreweries are giving way to smaller craft breweries, and because of this trend, never in the history of our country has beer been more of an artisanal practice. This is quite an occasion.

Quite an occasion, because this example provides us with an excellent gauge for how our culture now approaches work. We can all see consumers trying to shift from quantity to quality. Toyota’s CEO recently said that their failure in manufacturing was because they had become more concerned with profit margin than with creating a quality product — ironic, since the highest quality products are starting to take in the most profit. We are becoming (we hope) more intelligent consumers who buy less crap and look for more efficient products.

How astonishingly refreshing that the CEO of a giant company would admit that they were more concerned with profit than their product — and express a (hopefully honest) desire to do something to change that. We’ve all known this was the common corporate modus operandi for years now. Watkins goes on to quote Dorothy Sayers talking about work (in the context of WWII, but very applicable to modern day):

The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work — our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure — and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people. We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?” . . . not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into the beer?”

So there are many strange problems in our culture. We have to think and work to solve these problems. They are not just Christian problems but problems of culture in general; many people are working on them, and no one has yet been able to find a solution. Now, the solution is never just a little book or a little definition or a little plan, and it will certainly take one or two generations to accomplish. The answer is not another kind of utilitarian art, Christian utilitarian art, because we shouldn’t be prostituting art to become something it was never made to be. Art was not made for evangelism. We should start a new development that bridges the gaps and solves the problem of the unreality of art in the museum. But first we have to pose the right questions. However, we are only just beginning to see those questions.

But the iPad looks to me like one more step towards a world of untactility.