transparency

We had a big ‘un this week: total over 30 cm of snow Thursday night and Friday with still more to come. When I got to work Friday morning half our team had taken a snow day. Good thing we’re in brownout, which means a slow work period for us: we have a moratorium on touching the network until the beginning of January, because any time you touch the network you introduce the possibility of error, and just think what Toys R Us would be saying to us if their phone or debit card lines went down for four hours on a Thursday afternoon before Christmas… Anyway, we *don’t* like to think about that sort of thing so we just don’t touch the network during the holiday season (or on Mothers’ Day). Meaning that for us network engineers, nothing we are doing right now is terribly urgent.

Oh, and it seems I’m a major Centraide / United Way donor. Those of you who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’ve been through some hard times. I was never on welfare, though there were times that would have been a step up in income, and I never used a food bank, though I did compromise in other difficult ways. So when I started getting regular paycheques from Evil Corporations I was truly grateful for the stability and food and control over my life I was now able to secure for myself. And as soon as I found out that I was able to have Centraide donations taken out of said paycheques I immediately signed up, thrilled to be able to contribute towards someone’s relief if not in my own direct labour, then at least in cash.

So every year Centraide invites me to attend some sort of philanthropic activity. I envisioned them as schmoozing opportunities for people who liked to think well of themselves, or perhaps as disguised trips to the zoo where rich people could meet tame poor people in a safe and controlled environment, and I always firmly declined with a little moue of distaste. But then I got an invitation to visit the Montreal Diet Dispensary, and accepted that one because I’d studied their protocol in detail at university and was interested in seeing what it actually looked like. And yes, it was exactly what I had feared it would be, and I was very impressed with the abilities of the MDD administration who clearly felt completely at ease both with their clientele and the philanthropists. Because while it was very interesting and educational, I just felt uneasy all over.

This year I got an invitation to volunteer at a Magasin de Partage (Sharing Store) in my neighbourhood, and I accepted that one too because I wanted to meet my neighbours in a way I don’t usually get to. So yesterday afternoon I left work early and headed over to the Maison de la Culture (a combination local library, museum, concert hall, teen centre and other stuff that I don’t know) to do my two hours of volunteering.

Karine, the volunteer organiser, was busy orienting someone else so I waited in the volunteer’s refreshment corner, enjoyed a coffee and muffin and talked to Gilbert, a guy in his sixties “with Centraide” who looked like a defrocked priest. He explained the principle of the Magasin de Partage. It replaces the traditional Christmas baskets that food banks used to give out. There were two main problems with the Christmas baskets: one is that people don’t get to choose their basket, which is both disempowering and means they are likely get something inappropriate for them. Another is that each organisation would do its own baskets, which meant that people could go from organisation to organisation and collect several. (Actually, I never really thought this was a problem: it rewards the entrepreneurial spirit, which is supposed to be a good thing – right?) Anyway, now we do the MdP which are like a grocery store laid out in a gym (in this case). People get a pushcart and a budget and load up what they want (though most items are rationed) and at the end they pay 10% of the value. So for instance, a single person is assigned a budget of $50. They get to choose $50 worth of groceries and they pay $5 at the cash. Then they get to choose a free present for everyone in the household and they get a lift home. There’s a driver and also a livreur (deliverer) who actually carries their groceries up to the apartment for them (the clientele of the MdP are all in walk-ups) and gets a quick look around. If there is clearly a serious problem with the household then social services can be alerted.

Allowing people to choose is important. Which means allowing people to criticise and reject: that’s what we’re there for. The entrepreneurial tendency is controlled by having a central registry across the island, so that people can only sign up for one grocery basket.

When Karine was ready for me she explained that I would be an accompagnatrice and accompany people through the aisles counting up what they spent, helping them budget and explaining the rationing. Very important to smile and relieve people’s embarassment about being there. Ok, sounds fun. But there were no shopping baskets. I waited around for a while and finally got fed up and found one that was full of Christmas decorations that hadn’t been put up yet, unloaded it onto a chair and got the next bénéficiaire (client) on the list.

I got a little tag like they staple onto your bags at the grocery store when they deliver your groceries and a budget sheet to fill out. People’s budgets were assigned when they applied: $50 for a single person plus $10 for every other person in the household. So a couple with four children would have a budget of $100 – but that had already been calculated for me. I always filled out my paperwork before picking up my clients, fully expecting that I’d have to redo half of it because people hadn’t shown up for their appointments. My stereotype of poor people is that they have very complicated lives because they can’t just pay for services they need, they have to trade services with other people who may or may not be reliable. So for instance if they need babysitting to come get their grocery basket, they might or might not be able to make it. I was astounded to realise that *everyone* made their appointment. On time. “Of course,” observed one of my clients. “We’re hungry.” Because of the snowstorm, however, there was a volunteer shortage and the organisation was behind schedule.

Anyway, my first customer was Carole, and I learned a lot from her. We went through the aisles of canned / rationed goods, and I explained what she was entitled to. (“You have a child, so you can take two big cans of soup.”) She took everything she was entitled to and argued with me about the rationing. By the time we’d finished that section she’d used up her budget and she had nothing left for bread, fruits and vegetables or milk and eggs. She had a nice big grocery basket and her canned / rationed goods lined the bottom of it forlornly. Someone else passed by with a small grocery basket overflowing with a couple of nice high-volume bags of bread, a big bag of chips and a big bag of potatoes. Carole was livid comparing her measly take with the other woman’s cornucopia. She accused me of shortchanging her and the other woman of abusing the system. I could see her point, so I went and got Karine and handed her over, saying maybe I had miscalculated or misunderstood the system, but there was a problem with Carole’s basket.

Karine came back to me later and said I had calculated just fine, but that Carole was simply a difficult person. It had taken three volunteers twenty minutes to calm her down and she had been demanding to talk to the manager. (Seems to me that she should have been entitled to talk to the manager, but whatever.) That’s what I thought, and that was pretty much what I had been prepared for: poverty damages people and I expected the people I was accompanying to show the damage. Second surprise of the evening: Carole was the only person I met who was needy in that way. The damage other people showed was more in the form of passivity. They were extremely compliant and cooperative.

The rest of the afternoon/evening was uneventful. I had signed up to work from three to five, but I ended up staying until eight-thirty. I was having a good time, I felt useful, and they were short of volunteers. I developed a routine, learning from Carole’s experience. I would take the smallest available grocery basket. I would greet my customer with a smile and a “vous” and explain what we were going to do. If they ate meat, we would place an order for meat first. Starting the aisles of canned / rationed goods, I would suggest an amount they should be spending per aisle in order to have money left over for bread, fruits and vegetables, and milk and eggs. I made a point of saying that I would tell them what they were allowed to take, but they didn’t have to take it. Once we’d finished those aisles I would ask them if they wanted milk and eggs and tell them how much they had left to spend on bread, fruits and vegetables and the unrationed table. Budgeting in manageable bits, one section at a time.

When I started the clientele was mostly single canadiens-français in their sixties and up. After five it started to be more families from “les communautés culturelles,” mostly haitian.

I particularly enjoyed:

Waiting in line with the old people. I would ask them if they were born in Montreal (nope) and ask a little about their history.

Accompanying a young couple, she newly pregnant, and watching him fuss over her and instruct her to get vegetables and whole-wheat bread while she looked longingly at the chips and chocolate cake.

Accompanying a muslim woman with a $100 budget who was having trouble making her full $100 because she wasn’t taking meat. I helped her decide whether there were animal products in the canned goods and went and found some shampoo that had been hidden away. She said merci when I dropped her off at the cash and seemed to mean it.

Accompanying families, showing the kids how to reject dented cans, look for expiry dates and inspect eggs for breaks.

Intervening on behalf of Paule who needed to call her brother-in-law for a lift from a pay phone: ‘Paule, do you have the quarter for the pay phone?’ so that she didn’t have to ask the cashier for the quarter herself.

But then I came to Marie-Annaes and her teenaged son. It was after eight, and they’d been waiting since 5:15. When I called her name she didn’t respond; Gilbert knew her though, and looked her in the face and said “Is there anyone here named Marie-Annaes?” and she got up with a start. When she got to me she was clearly exhausted; I realised that she hadn’t had supper and might not have eaten all day. She was kind of out of it, so her son did most of the shopping. Because he was a teenager I provided a little more “encadrement” than I did for other people, suggesting particular choices: ‘If you take the box of cereal you won’t be able to take both loaves of bread you’re entitled to. Which would you rather have?’ And Marie-Annaes would murmer little things to him from time to time.

When it was time to stand in line for the cash I went and got a little snack bar for Marie-Annaes so that she wouldn’t collapse. And then there was the problem of how to get the groceries home. They weren’t going to get delivery until very late, what with the combination of the lack of volunteers and the snowy roads, and they weren’t going to be able to carry it all. Hm. Ok, I suggested: maybe you could separate what you need for supper tonight and walk home with that, and then it doesn’t matter if they deliver the rest at two in the morning? We thought about that while we waited, the line being exceptionally slow. Marie-Annaes’ son and another teenager with his mother waved at each other a couple of times without actually talking or hanging out. The second time I asked if it was a kid from his school (no, from his old school) and said ‘Isn’t it nice when you see someone you know here, you feel less alone. Anybody can come through here.’ And Marie-Annaes touched my arm and said Merci in a way that made me think she meant it, not that she wanted me to shut up already.

So we got to the cash and I explained that Marie-Annaes might want to separate out what she wanted to take home for supper and have the rest delivered. Hm, said the cashier. One of them will still have to wait here to go home with the driver.

I was stunned. Ok, so giving people a lift home is a nice thing to do, but grocery stores routinely deliver groceries to people who have left the store. What’s going on here? They aren’t going to get their lift before 10:30 at the earliest. And they haven’t eaten.

And I looked around: in the waiting area were families waiting for food because they were hungry. The parents had been working all day, had picked up their kids from daycare and shown up on time for their appointments. We were three hours behind in getting them their grocery carts, and we were now going to make them wait here until all hours for delivery? Gilbert was still in a relaxed, upbeat temper doing tricks with plastic bags to amuse the kids. This was unreal. Perverse. I was tired, my blood sugar was dropping despite the regular snacks I had access to in the volunteer corner, and I was all of a sudden not having a good time any more.

Marie-Annaes said it was ok, they would wait and go home with the lift. I warmly wished her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, she went off to wait in another line to choose a gift for herself, and I got my coat and went home. I didn’t even say goodbye or alert anyone.

*** *** ***
That was the end of the story the first times I told it. Then I told it to Anne, who sternly reframed my experience for me: “Alison, you’re a major donor. That’s why you’re there. You are in a position to write a letter to a director and be paid attention to. And if you choose to become involved with that organisation, you are in a position to ask to be listened to.”

Oh. She’s right, you know. Oh dear. Now I have choices. Empowering but scary.

[originally transmitted by e-mail December 17, 2005]

Yet another Tuesday night movie review.

Usually the Cinéma du Parc is relatively empty. Tonight it was full of old people.

Mark left the theatre with tears on his cheeks; I left unmoved but full of questions. My grasp of history is decidedly vague, and while I know the names of some of the major personalities I’ve never taken a modern history course of any description and have generally avoided war movies. So what I little I know about WWII is from sidebars in books and articles about other things.

Mark’s take: the movie was about the protestation of innocence, “Ich habe es nicht gewußt,” “I didn’t know.” What does that claim mean, when even Hitler’s personal secretary could make it – apparently believing herself? Mark is angry about Holland’s role in the war and particularly about the way the Netherlands like to portray themselves as good guys who helped Jews, when in fact they were as bad as Canada and refused to let Jews in. (No, no, those bits weren’t in the movie.) And he fully understands the German phenomenon of an older generation who say it wasn’t them, or who point out their own sufferings and demand to know who feels sorry for them? contrasted with a younger (our) generation fully prepared to take on the guilt and responsibility for all the horrors committed before they (we) were even conceived.

My first reaction was to wonder whether the war movies coming out these days that appear to have a certain resonance with current events is deliberate or my own projection.

Other musings: to the extent that the portrayal of the personalities was accurate, a point was made that you can’t really tell who’s on the wrong track by looking at them up close. You need to step back and take a broader look. For instance, Hitler was portrayed as a charismatic but lonely nutcase (looked like bipolar disorder to me, but so does a lot of stuff) who valued his friends. Which may have been true, but even so was not the most important thing about him. And this is how it makes sense that his secretary didn’t grasp what he was doing though Churchill did. (This I *think* was one of the points of the movie: I don’t think we were really supposed to feel sorry for him.) (But maybe we were? I did find that too many of the top brass were treated a little too sympathetically. Not that I expect all people who are a force for evil to be marked with large neon horns – but for someone supporting or actively waging war in a nationalist cause to appear uniformly kind and thoughtful seems just a little odd. Especially when you are not this person’s child but a cinema viewer with magic wall-fly powers.)

Anyway. Something I found quite delightful was libertarian-speak in the mouths of the Nazi generals. Ha! One quote I particularly enjoyed went something like this: “I have no compassion [for the young untrained German recruits who are being sent to fight against much greater numbers with no ammunition and who will die within hours or days in battles that the generals know perfectly well to be unwinnable]. They gave us the mandate to fight this war and now their little throats are being cut.” Among various speeches condemning weakness and promoting responsibility for consequences and protecting honour with guns.

I was also quite struck by the desperate busyness of the last days – issuing medals, hanging traitors – they knew they had lost so this was their last chance to take care of business before the Russians arrived – paralleling the stepped-up activity at the crematoria (not shown in the movie). It says something I recognise too well about human psychology that I should probably dwell on at length but frankly, I’d rather not.

Technically it was very well-acted and I think the sets were well done, but there wasn’t much else special about it. It was long and slow, paralleling the experience of Berliners waiting for the end. But that’s ok, not a reason not to go.

[originally transmtted by e-mail March 23, 2005]

Ok, let me be clear about my bias here: I am one of those people who believe in the body. (This is sneaky appropriation of feminst vocabulary.) The mean way to describe me would be “biological determinist” except that all I think that biology determines is what an individual can bring to the table. Outcomes are up for grabs.

Old-style (Victorian?) ideas about the body were that it determined outcomes: women were inherently feeble, Jews were inherently sneaky, the lower classes were destined to fail. No matter how you raised someone, breeding would out. (See “Wuthering Heights.”)

John Locke, then Freud, then Skinner proposed a radically liberating view: that we come into the world prepared to learn, and who we are is the sum total of what we have discovered and what we have been taught. We bring no agendas of our own to the table. In the 1970s this translated into a lot of talk about “conditioning” and the hope that we could raise a nonviolent, gender-free generation.

The problem with using “conditioning” to explain away everything you don’t want is that to condition a lab animal you use a system of rewards and punishments. Rewarding with food works best when the animal is starved for three days first. So you can’t get away from the body: what the animal finds rewarding or aversive. At the very least, we determine our own rewards and punishments.

*** *** ***
Now to the present and what I am finding problematic. It’s not the articles about Leroi’s book in particular, it’s a sneaky sort of return to Victorian smugness I am seeing generally, the new emphasis on genetic science providing convenient camouflage.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 17, 2005]

Yesterday I read a New York Times article by Armand Marie Leroi about racial genetics:

Then my mother forwarded me a transcript of an interview with him:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge156.html

Bio of Mr. Leroi from edge.org :
“ARMAND MARIE LEROI was born in Wellington, New Zealand. A Dutch citizen, his youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He was awarded a Bsc. by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Ph.D. by the University of California, Irvine in 1993. His doctoral work was supervised by Michael Rose and concerned the genetics of ageing in fruit flies. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, in Scott Emmons’s laboratory. Here he began to work on growth in the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, and its relatives. In 1996 he was appointed Lecturer at Imperial College London; in 2001, Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. He lives in London.

He is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, winner of The Guardian First Book Award, 2004. ”

He is careful to say that racism is a bad thing, and that the genetic bases for racial differences is simply a fascinating scientific question. He also says, “these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that’s a fine thing. But I suggest that it’s time that we grew up.”

What, he thinks that being careful about the consequences of your ideas is a sign of immaturity? I can’t say I agree.

I’m a little worried about the pickup his book has had: people seem to be saying finally, permission to talk about race! A practical use for the human genome project: scientific vocabulary for discussing race in polite company! Whee-haw!

Why? Sure, we are meat machines and our genes affect everything we do. (At a very basic level, a human can’t learn to do anything that humans can’t do. Fly, for instance.) Variations in our genes can be reasonably expected to have effects on the various things we do as humans.

But so what? We are learning animals. We sacrifice years to learning basic things like walking that other animals are programmed to do within minutes of birth. This enables us to adapt to all kinds of different physical and social environments. We can learn to live in the arctic or in deserts; as hunter-gatherers or accountants; we can learn to button our shirts with our toes if we happen to be born without hands; we can learn trust and pacifism or fear and war. Sure, some of us learn some of these things more easily than others. That’s what makes us so successful as a species: in any group there will be someone who can get the hang of a new situation and lead the way.

But what is the social value in emphasising the genetic basis for variation?

One of the big things now is pharmaceuticals which work better in some genetic groups than others. But calling this race is kind of strange in countries (like the Americas) where most individuals come from a genetically mixed background. If the pharmaceutical companies know why drugs work better in some people than others – a variation in Cytochrome P, for instance – then test for that. Because while the group might have a statistically raised frequency of a particular genetic variation, the individual taking the drug either has it or they don’t.

Another thing that people eager to talk about race bring up is the variation in disease rates among different population groups. Typically the greater rates of high blood pressure in Americans of African descent. Well, until the social reasons for this variation are controlled for, why bother looking at the genetic reasons? Because it’s simply not true that all people of African descent everywhere in the world have high blood pressure.

Anyway, I was supposed to be at work half an hour ago. So I’m going to stop now. I haven’t read Mr. Leroi’s book, but in his interviews his science seems to be very shaky. I could go on and explain why, but maybe later. Now I have to go.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 16, 2005]

Appropriate or not, I’ve just arrived home from a screening of Inside Deep Throat.

(Worth a look anyway. The major thesis is that Deep Throat was a significant sort of cultural nexus because so many different people had so many different things to say about it. The minor thesis is that old people get lumps in their throats looking back on when they were young and beautiful and thought the world was going to open up for them.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 8, 2005]