I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it.
Finished reading: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine 📚
The resonance overflows. I will be revisiting this one, and hopefully posting more about it. One thing that kept coming to mind thoughout the book was an essay I wrote for a global health class in 2020: What kind of expertise shall we look to? For me, it’s never been Hans Rosling. It’s Paul Farmer!
Don’t let the rhetoric hide the reality:
Hine again:
Some of this was little more than the playacting of the privileged: long before Covid, the urban middle classes had acquired a taste for simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence, as embodied in the handmade aesthetic of a Whole Foods store, its fixtures and fittings carefully disguising the concrete box into which it is built.
😆 Of course, it’s not even the tiniest coincidence that Whole Foods Market, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon. Sometimes I think we should be more grateful when they say the quiet part out loud.
Dougald Hine:
Two possibilities arise from this newfound sense of vulnerability. It can be a humbling moment in which, brought down to earth, we are able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the licence for the grandest version of that project yet: an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and our more-than-human kith, into an object of global management and control, and all in the name of ‘saving the world’.
I’m only half way through, but Hine’s At Work in the Ruins has a solid place in my “this should be mandatory high school or undergrad reading” list.
Douglad Hine:
In its attention to whatever is missing or taken for granted, art can lead us upstream.
“The power of art to reveal the dominant consciousness and challenge it.” — This subtitle done gimme goosbumps.
One of Dougald Hine’s more hilariously good lines is when he admits not having any idea how to respond to someone who I can only describe as having outrun the use of meaningful conversation: “I couldn’t even find the energy to reply with a link to a talk that might give him a clue where I was coming from.”
I could take that in a few different ways for a fair amount of time. But for now, I’m thinking of Thomas Merton:
Light Phone asks, “How much is you time worth?”. Refreshing. Excited for January