Eight Myths Americans Need to Unlearn About America by umari haque

Eight Myths Americans Need to Unlearn About America

A Note on Writing About American Collapse
by umair haque

https://eand.co/eight-myths-americans-need-to-unlearn-about-america-560fa10ddba6

In my essays about American collapse, there’s a single, simple, underlying point. Americans — just average ones, not Jeff Bezos, teachers, truck drivers, accountants — should live richer, happier, healthier, saner lives than they do. By a long, long ways. They shouldn’t be living at the perpetual edge of ruin — which, inevitably, is turning many of them, enraged, against democracy itself.

Yet, by now, whenever I make this point, a chorus arises here and there to tell me how much I must “hate America” (and therefore, what a terrible person I am). It’s funny, because it’s perfectly understandable. Nobody wants to entertain the idea their society is failing. And yet.

LOL — my friends, if suggesting Americans should have better lives is what it means to hate America, then perhaps you are the ones who are confused, not me. Don’t you think that’s backwards? I do. Shouldn’t we all want that? (It’s in these kinds of precise ways I mean that America is becoming a backwards place — things have come to mean their polar opposites now, but I digress.) So let’s begin with one of the most funny and strange myths of all.

If you criticize America, that means you hate America — and Americans!!Does it? I think my essays present many of you with a strange paradox. I’m someone who wants better lives for Americans — but is also quite critical, sometimes unsparingly so, of America. But how could it ever be any other way? You see how badly American thinking has failed, in just that one sentence. If we are to ever suggest Americans should be doing better, then we must be critical of America too, and examine why it hasn’t flourished and developed. And that means, as I often do, suggesting that various forms of folly, woven deep into the fabric of everyday life, are the reason that things have not worked out for Americans. And this myth — that the moment we are critical of America, then we must hate Americans, and therefore, people who are critical of America are not to be trusted — is the most foolish of all, because it makes progress more or less impossible. Then we go on believing people who aren’t critical of America, and imagine only those kinds of people want the best for us — but both those things can’t ever be true.

So let me outline six more myths I keep hearing, here and elsewhere — things that can’t be true. Either these strange and foolish myths can be true, or America can be where it is — but you can’t have both.

Americans are the most virtuous people of all!! (Because they give the most to charity, go to church the most, and so on.) This myth is the strangest one of all — it’s exceptionalism, in moral form. But is it true? Wait — wasn’t America segregated until 1971? So how could this myth ever have been true? But let’s ignore that. America does have a high rate of charitable giving — but that is because contributions are tax deductible, and the ultra-rich use them as a way to shield themselves from taxes. America’s charity rate is a reflection — and a cause — of inequality, not proof of virtue. How could it be? The average American is broke — living paycheck to paycheck — and so while he might eke out a few dollars for charity, he can hardly afford it at any socially transformative level.

But the principle is what I want you to see: to say people who are so rich they simply don’t exist in other societies give outsized charity to avoid taxes therefore we are all virtuous is not a good way to think about society. It only allows us to reinforce the central American problem — people do not want to support each other via a genuine social contract, public goods, and the “taxes” — the social investments — they necessarily entail. (Also, being religious is not a very good proxy for being nice people. Have you looked at, say, the Spanish Inquisition? Iran and Saudi Arabia are pious societies, too. Does that mean it makes them more humane ones? Hardly.)

So let’s use better observations. If Americans are especially virtuous people…why do they let each other die without insulin and make their kids do “active shooter drills”? Why don’t they invest in mothers having childcare and elderly people retiring in peace and students being educated without life-crushing debt? I’m not saying Americans can’t be virtuous people, or that they’re especially bad people. What I am saying is that the idea that Americans are historically special, especially and triumphantly noble people, better than the rest, all the other nations, is just that, a myth. It is a form of hubris which blinds us to the fact that a refusal to act in, or even believe that there is a public good, a common wealth, has impoverished America of all the forms of it. Virtue is a thing which results in the public good — and yet America has no public goods, from healthcare to retirement to childcare to elderly care. So how can it be made of noble, virtuous, fraternal, equals? Do you see my point? “Virtue” and “the public good” are not just abstractions for philosophers to debate, my friends — they are razor-sharp sociopolitical realities, which in America, are missing.

Virtue leads to the public good. Therefore, the deficit of the public good, of public goods, tell us in no unsparing terms that Americans are not especially virtuous, in any way we might wish to think about it: compassionate, humble, kind, true, couragous, loyal, honest and so on. I’m sorry to say it. Instead, probably, I think, they are traumatized, shattered, and paralyzed, by the unsparing horror of living in a failed capitalist state. Americans are constantly being relentlessly exploited by capitalism — and it’s hard to be especially virtuous when you are busy being traumatized. Now, you can “hate” me for pointing that out — or you can think: “wait, why don’t more people discuss this point?” Not wanting to understand the above doesn’t make it an iota less true, and therefore I don’t say it to “insult” you, but to illuminate it. If you want to improve society (instead of just hate), then, well, this failure of the public good to ever really emerge, which points to a deficit in virtue, too, is a deep, profound, corrosive moral, social, and cultural conundrum which must be resolved.

Americans aren’t self-interested egomaniacs, self-interest has made them excel. Really? What does America excel at? Germans make the best cars, Britain the best media, France the best food, Italy the best design, and so on. America doesn’t make the best stuff — it doesn’t make stuff anymore at all, really. But that’s just on the level of material consumption, of capitalism. It’s Europe that’s investing the most in tomorrow’s great scientific research — from clean energy to life extension to quantum physics. In America, these things are mostly left to billionaires to fund, and so Americans have Tesla and weird startups that let people buy teenagers’ blood — but Europeans have cleaner energy grids and advanced public healthcare. You can try to name a single thing America really excels at now, but you will fail — why else would America be in so much debt, turning back to isolationism, seeking a sense of “greatness” by demonizing and vilifying little Mexican children?

“Excellence”, really, is a moral proposition: to excel is to do something that genuinely benefits others, better than others. That is what virtue meant to the Greeks, who invented it in the Western sense. But it’s self-evident this kind of virtue doesn’t exist much in America anymore, because nobody’s life is getting better, it’s only getting worse. If Americans “excelled”, then people’s lives wouldn’t be falling apart. Instead, they’ve been taught that being the sharpest-toothed predator, like the hedge fund manager, or the private equity baron, is what is right — but that is not what excellence is at all, in the classical sense of moral virtue. Yet such are the wages of capitalism. America, sadly, replaced excellence — which is about transcending one’s self-interest — with winning a predatory capitalist competition, which is what self-interest leads to. Being a better, hungrier, cleverer predator, my friends, is not what excellence is, but it’s negation, absence, and opposite.

America is full of people trying to do the right thing!! Maybe it is. Hasn’t it always been? And yet, over and over again, those people seem to lose, against the opposite kind. Why is that? In my last essay, I discussed a scene of street surgery that happened just down the block from me here in Europe. Someone said, angrily: “America has paramedics too!!” Sure it does — so does Pakistan. So what? Neither one has the systems and institutions do something like street surgery — a great innovation, a complex dance of public goods working together. Let me make the point clearer. There are many Americans who try do the right thing. But it’s at the point of genuine systemic and institutional change that they all too often stop. And yet without change at that scale, people never have the freedom, power, or resources to actually do the right thing — as a matter of incentives, of duty, of obligation — they only go on trying to want to do it. Hence, America stays in this vicious spiral of people who want to do the right thing, but are prevented from just that by its institutions, laws, codes, rules, and norms. Until Americans challenge things at that level, little is likely to change. Trying to do the right thing is not a substitute for wanting and building and investing in a society in which the right thing to do is also the normal, correct, everyday, not to mention, rewarded thing. One is romantic individualism, the other is social transformation.

America isn’t collapsing!!! It’s not the Walking Dead out there!! What does collapse mean to you, exactly? The Purge? The Rapture? American culture has always been curiously full of apocalyptism, and that tendency has only grown as America declined, and then collapsed. Why? Because imagining that “things could be worse!” makes us feel better. Phew! Sweet relief. But the facts speak for themselves. Life expectancy is falling, the vast majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, they can’t raise $1000 for an emergency, mass shootings are a regular event of daily life, people have to crowdfund basic medicine, suicides are skyrocketing. I could go on. If your bar for collapse is Mad Max meets the Strain, then, sure, America hasn’t collapsed yet…to that point. But it has collapsed in three key ways, which are the real, genuine and true kinds — not the stuff of science fiction endtimes. As a rich society — most Americans don’t live in one anymore. As a democracy — it doesn’t really represent people accurately anymore. And as a society — Americans have no social contract, really, that unites them, as we’ve discussed — because virtue has not culminated in the public good . In those three ways, collapse is as real and lethal as climate change. You can disagree with me, sure — but reality doesn’t care about what I think, or you think. It laughs at we “think”, and goes on being what it is.

Americans love freedom!! You just don’t get us!! Do they? Let me give you an example. In London, people can go to the NHS — or a private doctor. They can watch the BBC’s many channels — or Fox News and the Discovery Channel. Wouldn’t you say that they’re freer? Even according to the American definition of freedom — choice — it’s true to say people in social democracies are vastly freer, because they can choose between capitalist and socialist institutions, goods, services, and that’s better for everyone — not because I say so, but because they live objectively better lives, in nearly every way. American don’t love freedom — they love capitalism. They equate the two, but the two are not equivalent. That is why they restrict their choices to capitalism, over and over again. Yet capitalism will never really give you much freedom — that is what America’s sad story tells us: it will give you subsistence wages, with which to buy things who price rises, and quality falls, every year, usually, so your life gets harder. Freedom is a much more sophisticated thing than Americans have been told — and until they think about what it really is, they will remain prisoners of an impoverished notion of it.

(We can’t compare America to any other country! Especially not strange, dangerous like Scandinavia or France! We can’t? Why not? How else do you suppose that nations make progress — if not by learning from one another? Americans have been told that other place are “homogeneous”, so America can’t be compared to them — but “homogeneity” is not the reason they are successful societies. There are many more “homogeneous” societies which are failures than successes, just look at Asia and Africa — so homogeneity can’t be why some societies succeed, self-evidently. This myth is exceptionalism, only in a negative form — no comparison is possible. But it is comparative analysis which teaches us the most, when it comes to political economy. Have you ever wondered why you don’t know (probably) how exactly the French retirement system works? How the British healthcare system works? How the Swiss government works? Americans still haven’t learned this stuff because no one teaches it to them — and no one teaches it to them because the myth of exceptionalism says there’s no reason to learn it. But there is: if we can’t understand what makes societies successful, how are we ever to be one?)

Just go away!! We don’t need to listen to people who are critical of America! They’ll never help us!! Listen. I don’t write about American collapse to persuade or convince you of anything. That is a job for pundits and talking heads. I am just an observer, and I share what I see. I am totally powerless to change anything about America whatsoever, so you don’t have to be threatened by me in any way.

Now, I’m not an impartial observer, that’s true. My observations are colored by having lived all over the world, in poor countries, in failed states, in social democracies — and studying economics, politics, and psychology outside America, too. That matters, because when you only study the American versions of these things, you end up in a one-dimensional place. Haven’t you ever wondered why American economists will never say: “hey, maybe we should have public healthcare?” It’s a narrow, small place, like a little closet. In which nothing, really, is possible. You end up believing the age-old myths, all over again, in the way that American economics is just the study of capitalism, or American psychology is basically behaviourism. Outside America, though, life, people, and especially thinking, are much bigger than this. Many things are possible. Life, ideas, thoughts, aren’t as constricted and narrow —”we can only ever be what we’ve always been! Capitalism, supremacy, and patriarchy forever!! “— and that sense, that zone, of freedom is what I try to impart.

So I think that in a sense, you are fortunate to have me as an observer — even the partial one that I surely am, even as horrible and clumsy and foolish as my words often are. Not because I am especially smart or nice or intelligent and so on, LOL — I’m not. I’m just another guy. Because America doesn’t have enough people who have different perspectives to begin with — not just “different beliefs”, but genuinely differing experiences, that possibility itself, what societies, people, ideas can be is very, very different in places that aren’t America. There are not many people in America who observe it in that way, which is the way that I do — because not many have a lens that isn’t just made of the same old American myths. Mostly, American commentary is made by people who’ve only ever lived, studied, worked, played in America. I haven’t — and so you are right that my perspective is going to be very different than, say, Tucker Carlson’s or Jake Tapper’s. I’m not that guy. I’m someone who couldn’t be more different. But do you think either of them really understands much about the world outside America’s borders? Or wants to?

One of the truest things I’ve learned, I think, watching some societies succeed, and others fail, is that that a society in trouble, like a person, is best served by listening to its critics — not to its sycophants, flatterers, and enablers. That was true for a collapsing Soviet Union, a Weimar Germany, a fascist Argentina — and it’s just as true today for a collapsing America. That principle — that it’s especially when things begin to crumble around us, we must understand that the house of prosperity didn’t rise, but how and why fissures in it turned into cracks (which is the idea of the word “criticism”, which originally meant “to judge”) — is always true. And it’s hard. I don’t blame many of you for getting angry at me. It’s precisely at the moment things are collapsing that we have a tendency to grasp and cling desperately onto the whatever shreds of the past that we can. And yet that is precisely when we must let them go, if we don’t wish to tumble into the abyss with them.

You can’t really unpick myths very well from the inside. When you’re in the labyrinth, you must slay the Minotaur. When you have stepped outside it, only then do you understand the meaning of the myth. And that is all I am trying to share with you, really.

Umair
October 2018

Eating for IBS - How to Stabilize the Touchiest Tummy

STRATEGY

Question: What is the single most important principle to eating for IBS?
Answer: Organize every meal along the lines of easily tolerated, high soluble fiber staples.

French or Sourdough bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, fat-free flour tortillas, baked com chips (Tostitos), pita bread, oatmeal, soy foods, polenta, and so on, must form the foundation of very meal and snack. Think of vegetables, fruit, seafood, beans, lentils, nuts, egg whites, and chicken breasts as secondary ingredients to be used in smaller quantities for flavor.

TIPS , TRICKS. AND HELPFUL HINTS FOR EATING AND COOKING

• Eat soluble fiber fuse whenever your stomach is empty.
• Chew thoroughly. This will help pre em you from eating too fast and swallowing air, which can cause problems.
• Eat at a leisurely pace--if you must eat in a hurry, serve yourself half portions. Remember that the first stage of digestion occurs in your mouth, as saliva begins to break down food. The less you rush this process the better.
• Eat small portions of food, and eat frequently-the emptier your stomach is, the more sensitive you will be.
• Avoid earing large amounts of food in one sitting as this can trigger an attack.
• Avoid ice-cold foods and drinks on an empty tomach. Cold makes muscles contract, and your goal is to keep your stomach and the rest of your GI tract as calm as possible.
• Avoid chewing gum, as it causes you to swallow excess air. which can trigger problems.
• Drink fresh water constantly throughout the day (not ice cold). Limit the amount of water or other fluids you drink with your meals, as this can inhibit digestion.
• Eat green salads - tiny portions, with nonfat dressing - at the end of the meal, not the beginning (tell people you're French).
• Peel, skin, chop, and cook fruits and vegetables; lightly mash beans, lentils, corn, peas, and berries. Finely chop nuts, raisins and other dried fruits, and fresh herbs. Nuts in particular can be quite tolerable when finely ground. To keep dried fruit from sticking to your knife when chopping, spray the blade with cooking oil first.
• Use only egg whites (two whites can substitute for one whole egg), and try to buy organic.
• You can almost always reduce the amount of oil called for in recipes by at least 1/3.
• Use non-stick pans and cooking spray, as this will dramatically lessen the amount of oil you cook with. Remember, with IBS the less at the better, period.

THINK SUBSTITUTION, NOT DEPRIVATION

• Substitute soy, rice, almoud, or oat milk for all dairy milk (check the ingredients to be sure there is no added oil). Try a wide variety of brand and flavors as the difference in taste can be dramatic. Some brands are truly wretched and some are delicious. My favorite is VicaSoy lit vanilla. It's helpful to keep two types of soy/rice milk on hand: unsweetened for cooking and vanilla for drinking.
• Use soy or rice substitutes for cream cheese, sour cream, ice cream, and other dairy produces (check the ingredients to be sure the items are low-fat).
• Many meat-based recip such as tacos, Sloppy Joes, chili, and so on, can be easily adapted to IBS guidelines by substituting textured vegetable protein (TVP, a soy food available in health food stores) for the ground beef. Simply eliminate the cooking oil and season the TVP as you would the meat. When well prepared most people honestly can't taste the difference. 

A NEW WAY TO EAT

   To incorporate raw fruits and veggies into your diet, peel and eat them in small quantities (just two or three bites) finely chopped as additions to high soluble fiber foods such as French breads, pastas, rice, and so on. It should also help to eat them toward the end of a meal. This is especially important when it comes to green salads. Eating them, as is customary in America, on an empty stomach at the beginning of lunch or dinner is likely to trigger an attack. Eating them at the end of a high soluble fiber meal is typically quite safe.
   For fruit salads follow the same guidelines. At breakfast have a bowl of oatmeal or toasted French bread first, then the fruit, and at lunch or dinner have the fruit for dessert.
   Remember that color is a good way to tell what types of nutrition fruits and vegetables offer; if you are completely intolerant of one try a same-color substitution. For example, if you can't eat cantaloupes, try mangoes. In my case. I can tolerate cabbage much more easily than lettuce though I don't know why.
   Whole wheat and wheat bran are extremely high in insoluble fiber, and foods such as whole-wheat breads and cereals need to be eaten with great care. For a daily staple, French and sourdough breads are safe, but whole-wheat breads are not. Whole wheat breads are more nutritious, because the outer coating of bran on the grain has not been removed as is the case in white breads. However, this bran is also very high in insoluble fiber, and can thus trigger attacks. For this same reason wheat bran cereals are not as safe a choice as rice. com, or oat varieties are. Does this mean you should never eat whole-wheat bread or wheat bran cereal? It most emphatically does not. As with fruits and vegetables. the more whole grains you can eat the better. It cannot be stressed enough that overall good health is dependent on insoluble fiber.
   However, whole wheat and wheat bran need to be eaten just as carefully as green salads. Do not eat them on an empty stomach, in large quantities. or without soluble fiber foods.
   Whole nuts can be high in insoluble fiber, and they are always high in fat. Although this fat is monounsaturated and lowers your risk of heart disease. it is still an IBS trigger. Like other insoluble fiber foods. nuts are crucial for good health, but must be eaten carefully. Finely grinding nuts and incorporating them into recipes with soluble fiber is a very safe way to eat them. Small amounts of nut butters on toasted French or sourdough bread are usually very tolerable as well.
   Popcorn is full of hard kernels that are pure insoluble fiber. There is no great nutritional value to popcorn so it can simply be eliminated from your diet. I realize this may make movies a lot less fun, but having to bolt from a theater for the bathroom half way through a film is a worse alternative. Sneak some pretzels or baked potato chips into the theater instead. and console yourself with the thought that you'll actually get to see the end of the movie if you bypass the popcorn concession stand.
   Fresh fruit juices, especially apple, prune, and grape, can trigger cramps and diarrhea. Fruit juice in general should be avoided on an empty stomach. Cranberry juice is usually a safe choice.
   Rhuburb, prunes, figs, licorice are all natural laxatives. As with fresh fruits in general, you may be able to incorporate these foods safely into recipe with soluble fiber. Just beware that they pose additional risks.

SPICE: UP YOUR LIFE

   You do not have to forego flavor and live on bland foods to avoid IBS attacks. Many people with IBS have been given this impression, but it is completely untrue. In fact, many typical bland foods - custards, puddings, warm milk, and so on - are major triggers due to their high fat and dairy content. On a related note, the real problem with spicy foods is that they are usually very greasy (chili, tacos, Sloppy Joes) and often meat-based. It is their high fat content that causes problems, not their seasoning. Hot chili peppers such as cayenne, jalapeno, halabanero, and so on, can cause GI distress in some people, but herbs and spices as a whole are not triggers for IBS. In fact, many herbs and spices, including ginger, mint, caraway, fennel, and chamomile, actually aid digestion. There is no limit on flavor when it comes to safe foods for IBS, so feel free to season your recipes any way you like.

ON A SWEET NOTE

   One of the best things about the IBS diet is that it requires no restriction of sugar, which means that lots of luscious desserts are yours for the baking. This does not mean that sugar should become a main component of your diet, of course. Sugar has zero nutritional value and is nothing more than a simple carbohydrate with lots of empty calories. It should be used in moderation for general good health, and desserts should be limited to small portions following nutritious meals.
   However, the fantastic thing about sugar is that it is most definitely not a trigger. It contains no insoluble fiber, no fat, no caffeine, no alcohol, and has no stimulant or irritant effect on the GI tract whatsoever. This is important to note, because some people with IBS find that they feel better when they eliminate sweets from their diet, and they then mistakenly assume that sugar must have been the underlying culprit. This isn't true - the real trigger in most desserts is far, butter, cream, egg yolks, shortening, solid chocolate, and whole milk form the basis of most traditional desserts, from cakes to cookies to ice cream. None of those foods are safe for IBS. So how can you enjoy traditional sweets? Easily and deliciously!

excerpt from Eating For IBS, by Heather Van Vorous

BLACK ORPHEUS: The philosopher-impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and his hidden hungers

BY TOBI HASLETT

     Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing-the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse. 

     It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir "The Big Sea." "Qui est-il?" Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply: A mild and gentle voice answered: "Alain Locke." 

     And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call. 

     During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they'd met - but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other's fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie boheme, while Locke was the "little, brown man" with status and degrees. 

     Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. "Locke's here, "Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. 'We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal." The words are grinning and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entree to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer's "Cane" - a novel in jagged fragments - had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, "emancipated" people. "I think we have enough talent," W.E.B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, "to start a renaissance." Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its "dean." Whoever knows his name today likely links it to "The New Negro: An lnterpretation," a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteentwenties- Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay; Zora Neale Hurston- squarely in the public eye. "The New Negro," which appeared just a year after Locke's summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty; fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world. 

     Jeffrey C. Stewart's new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke." But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes, 

     Locke became a "mid-wife to a generation of young writers," as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it. 

     Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding "need for love." But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke's posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box. 

     Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia's black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, "fanatically middle class," and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated - he was a graduate of Howard Law School - but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family's finances. 

     Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny's project. "I was indulgently but intelligently treated," Locke later recalled. "No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games." Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father's death, when he was six, "threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six. "Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard. 

     Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble-gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat-while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren't "gentlemen," and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled: 

     Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. ... They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I'm not used to that class and I don't intend to get used to them. 

     This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke's contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. "I am not a race problem," he later wrote to Mary. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke." 

     He'd arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar - though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial elites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis - ultimately rejected by Oxford - on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son. 

     Locke's other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man's sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, proteges, and students - but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in "The New Negro." His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years-though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W.E.B. Du Bois's daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as "the symbolic march of young black America," possessed of a "dark and shimmering beauty" and announcing "a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world." To Locke, it was a farce. 

     He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black elite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois's Crisis, which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson's Opportunity, the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on "political" art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further - left members of the movement notably Hughes and McKay - had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke's essays on aesthetics ("Beauty Instead of Ashes," "Art or Propaganda?", "Propaganda-or Poetry?") made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries' political hopes. Black art, in Locke's view, was mutable and vast. 

     Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called "Race Contacts and Interracial Relations," in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly "biological" understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: "cultural pluralism." 

     The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that "make a difference"- which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke's blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a "people": these weren't expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition-to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people's origins without bolting them to their past. 

     His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siecle black elite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary's wake, Locke didn't present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch - her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests. 

     "The New Negro," which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race's youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic, revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race's patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement's most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called "the niggerati" - and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance. 

     The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility- not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them-as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they'd been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro. 

     But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn't possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of "the younger generation" to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, "from medieval America to modern." Previously, "the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact," he wrote, but now, "in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is--or promises at least to be-a race capital." 

     Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoule and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their "folk spirit," displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. "So far as he is culturally articulate," Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, "we shall let the Negro speak for himself" 

     The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke's bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist - after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War ­ was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on "the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper- sensitiveness and 'touchy' nerves." So the book's roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained. 

     But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. "The New Negro" thrust forth all the ironies of Locke's ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. "What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?" asks a Hughes poem, titled "Nude Young Dancer." Locke liked it - but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include "Spunk," a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder. 

     Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay's protest poem from "White House" to "White Houses" an act of censorship that severed the two men's alliance. "No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects," the affronted poet wrote to Locke. "When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!" 

     And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to "The New Negro" that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was "Capital of the Black Middle Class, " an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study "The Black Bourgeoisie." A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had "either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses." Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless elite. 

     The years after "The New Negro" were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He'd been formed and polished by elite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with "primitive peoples." Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro's unspoiled heart. 

     Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed ( as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn't align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile "mid-wife" of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers-much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own. 

     The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled "Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane" for Survey Graphic, in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both "capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other." Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger. 

     Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. "Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace," a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation's enemies and their "passion for arbitrary unity and conformity." He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright's "Native Son" as a "Zolaesque J'accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy." And he remained riveted by the Negro's internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence's series in the offices of Fortune, Locke exulted that "The New Masses couldnt have done this thing better.") Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn't quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history. 

     Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was "The Negro in American Culture," a book he hoped would be his summum opus. "The New Negro" anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But "The Negro in American Culture" - he'd signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945 - was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service ofblack expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences ("It's an awful bother," he apologized to one friend, "but must turn out up to expectation in the long run") or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason's death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose. 

     But he couldn't finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide--but not a sexual equal. "What I am trying to say, Alain," the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, "is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I'm certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon - I don't know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again." Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke's life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself "an old girl." Yet Stewart's biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. At more than nine hundred pages, it's a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances. This is touching-and strangely fitting. Stewart's research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart's vigor falters as Locke's own scholarly energies start to wane. "Locke's involvement with the race issue," Stewart finally admits about "The Negro in American Culture," "had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself-to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people." 

     Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke's most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teenager when he found himself looped into Locke's affections. "You see youth is my hobby, " Locke wrote him at one point. "But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth." Russell was there-along with a few other ex-beaux-in 1954, at Benta's Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke's death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois's eulogy: "singular in a stupid land." 

     The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture-and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last,in the history he wished to redeem. "We're going to let our children know," Martin Luther King,Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, "that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe." Locke's class had cleaved him from the "masses" - and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his, race. "With all my sensuality and sentimentality," he wrote to Hughes after Paris, "I love sublimated things."

Originally appeared in The New Yorker, May 21, 2018
Photograph by Gordon Parks

A review of "Rust & Stardust"

Rust & Stardust is a break-your-heart novel based on a true crime, the kidnapping of Florence (Sally) Horner by Frank LaSalle in Camden, NJ in 1948 which was the basis for Nabokov's Lolita. It is a dark, disturbing story told very well.

It is June of 1948. Sally wants to make friends with a group of girls who have a secret club. School is almost over, and if she can make friends, she’ll have someone to play with over the summer. The girls tell her that she can join if she passes the initiation – stealing something from the local Woolworth’s store. With the other girls waiting at the soda counter, Sally roams the store and eventually puts a composition book into her sweater. As she’s ready to leave the store, a man (Frank LaSalle) gets up from the counter, grabs her arm and takes her aside. He tells her he’s an FBI agent, and would hate to see a girl like her be placed in juvenile detention for stealing. He won’t tell the police about her crime, but will get the matter cleared up himself with her at the courtroom if she just does what he says. Sally looks around for the girls, but they have disappeared.

Within days, Frank tells Sally that he has been told that the case must be heard in the Atlantic City courtroom. Sally is to tell her mother that a friend has invited Sally to join her family on their week vacation to Atlantic City. Her mother, Ella, is worried because she doesn’t know the family Sally is referring to, yet doesn’t want to deprive her daughter of something that she herself cannot provide to her. She agrees to meet the father. Frank cons her as well, telling Ella that his wife and daughter are already in Atlantic City, but he has asked a female co-worker going to AC as well to act as a chaperone, because it would seem improper if the two of them travelled alone. Satisfied, Ella sees Sally and Frank off on the bus.

But one week turns into two, then three, then four… Frank has Sally write Ella postcards saying what a wonderful time she’s having etc., but in reality, Frank ties Sally up and locks the room anytime he has to leave. He tells her that the court date has been postponed, that if she tries to escape, he will tell the police about the theft and she will be sent away, shaming her family. Then the sexual assaults begin. With each new assault, Sally loses more and more of herself and soon realizes that he has no intention of letting her go. They move from place to place, for two years before LaSalle is caught and Sally is returned to her family.

During that time, her family and several police departments are searching for her, offering a reward for information. Several people they encounter think something is amiss, but don’t step up to get involved. There are also a couple of missed opportunities when people are prepared to help her and then, due to differing circumstances, have to leave the area before they can follow through on it.

Greenwood does an excellent job of telling this story from multiple viewpoints to provide the reader with a complete view of what’s going on from multiple angles. The characters are complex and very well drawn.

This novel is graphic and hard to read at times. There should be a trigger warning that this story is about the kidnapping and abuse of a minor.  While I can't say I "enjoyed" reading Rust & Stardust, I consider it a worthy use of my time and intellectual energy to read. 

Disclosure: I did receive a reviewer’s copy and I was not paid or compensated to write a review.

Some Veterans Can Now Claim Refund of Taxes Paid on Disability Severance Payments

The Internal Revenue Service is advising certain veterans who received disability severance payments after January 17, 1991, and included that payment as income that they should file Form 1040X, Amended U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, to claim a credit or refund of the overpayment attributable to the disability severance payment. This is a result of the Combat-Injured Veterans Tax Fairness Act passed in 2016.

Amount to Claim
Veterans can submit a claim based on the actual amount of their disability severance payment by completing Form 1040X, carefully following the instructions. However, there is a simplified method. Veterans can choose instead to claim a standard refund amount based on the calendar year (an individual's tax year) in which they received the severance payment. Write "Disability Severance Payment" on line 15 of Form 1040X and enter on lines 15 and 22 the standard refund amount listed below that applies:
• $1,750 for tax years 1991 - 2005
• $2,400 for tax years 2006 - 2010
• $3,200 for tax years 2011 - 2016

Claiming the standard refund amount is the easiest way for veterans to claim a refund, because they do not need to access the original tax return from the year of their lump-sum disability severance payment.

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48. Ease Your Internet Speed: internet providers always push the newest, faster options, but a basic service (Mbps) is fine for the typical family to surf, email and stream videos. Optimum Online offers that speed at $29.99 a month, save $120 annually.

49. Turn Down Your Water Heater: most water heaters come from the factory set at 140 degrees, hot enough to scald. Turn it down to 120 degrees and save about $60 annually.

50. Get Magazines Cheap: subscriber to lots of magazine? Then consider the Texture app: for one monthly fee, you get access to digital versions of over 200 popular magazine. Save $10 to $50 per subscriptions.

51. Check Airline Consolidators: they buy tickets in bulk and sell them at a discount. A round trip from Boston to London was $419 through AirlineConsolidator.com versus $545 on Aer Lingus, saving $127.

52. Blind-book a Hotel: Hotwire.com offers saving up to 60 percent if you will book before knowing the name of the hotel, that’s $120 saved on a $200 room.

53. Get Gimp for Photo Editing: love to do sophisticated photo editing? Download Gimp for free and save $120 annually over paying $10 per month for Photoshop.

54. Seal Your Home: inspect for leaks at windows and doors with a lighted incense stick, sealing them could cut $1K heating bill by $200.

55. Rent a Dress: need a glamorous dress or evening gown that you only plan to wear once? Don’t buy it, rent it at sites like RentTheRunway.com – a gown that sells for $695 can be rented for $115, savings $580.

56. Use a Digital-Only Bank: it offers better saving rates. The average annual percentage yield (APY) on saving accounts is around 0.08 percent, but online banks offer APY’s around 1.5 percent. If you stash $20K for a year, the earning difference will be $286.

57. Vacation In a Dorm: college overseas rent summer dorm rooms. In Perugia, Italy, a week at Case Monteripido costs $260 versus $430 for the Primavera Mini Hotel. Save $170, go to UniversityRooms.com

58. Buy Staples by Subscription: use a service like Amazon’s Subscribe & Save to save up to 15 percent on goods you buy frequently, delivered on a set schedule. Sample savings: $15.25 per month off a total of $101.68 for a typical mix of items, that’s $183 annually.

59. Ski For Cheap: multi-mountain passes from websites such as EpicPass.com or MountainCollective.com can save you big. IkonPass.com charges an adult $699 for eight days of skiing at 26 destinations. That’s $175 less than eight tickets at the window.

60. Get a Tankless Water Heater: they’re up to 30 percent more efficient than tanks that waste energy keeping water hot all the time. They typical family spends $500 annually heating water, you could save $150.

61. Switch to a New Credit Card: AARP credit card from Chase gives you $100 if you spend $500 in your first three months – and three percent case back at restaurants and gas stations. Save $103 on the bonus  and a $100 meal.

62. Don’t’ Drench Your Lawn: it needs just one inch of water per week, including rain. Sprinklers often deliver much more than that. Put a coffee mug under the sprinkler and stick in a ruler when you are done. If you collected 2 inches of water, you are spending about $158 a month during the summer on wasted water.

63. Take a Defensive Driving Course: many auto insurers will shave as much as 10 percent off your annual premiums if you take a course. AARP offers a Smart Driver course online for members, annual insurance savings: $200.

64. Share Season Tickets:  arrange with your seat neighbors tot trade tickets you can’t use. Save $200 on a pair of NFL tickets.

65. Get Retroactive Refunds: stores will refund the difference if the price drops soon after you buy an item. The Earny app finds and claims price drops. Savings: $220 when that laptop you ordered drops in price.

66. Market Your Old Electronics: many once-popular items have become collectibles. For example, a first-generation iPod was going for $150 on eBay recently.

67. Clean Your Trap: a dryer can lose 75 percent of its efficiency if lint clogs its trap. Clean it after every use and save $101 on the annual cost of operating a dryer.

68. Want a New TV for the Superbowl? The best deals often in the weeks before the game. Last year Best Buy price for a 65-inch Sony dropped by $400.

69. Raise Your Deductible: boosting the deductible on a homeowners policy from $500 to $1K could save you 25 percent, according to the Insurance Information Institute, or $307 off on an average $1,228 policy.

70. Find Free Wi-Fi: download Wi-FiFinder app that locates nearby locations where WiFi is free.

71. Free Recyclables: join your local chapter at Freecycle.org – then see if someone wants to give away stuff you are about to buy. The NYC chapter recently listed a free “hardly used” portable crib that cost $60 new.

72. Swap Clothes Online: RehashClothes.com has photos of more than 10,000 items of clothing that its members want to swap. See something you like? Offer a piece of clothing in exchange, and if the offer is accepted, swap through the mail. No money involved except postage. You might save $100 on a nice dress or jacket.

73. Stream Free Movies: go to Kanopy.com – if you belong to one of the 4,000 participating public libraries and campuses, you can stream 30,000 movies from free. If you watch one movie a week, you’ll save about $156 annually over renting movies online.

74. Get it Fixed For Free: at RepairCafe.org you can find an event near you where volunteers help fix a variety of household items that folks can’t fix themselves. You could save $100 by faxing that old lamp.

75. Swap Services: sign up at U-Exchnage.com to trade your talent for someone else’s. You might save $350 the next time you need a plumber, if you can, say, handle his taxes.

76. Join Silver Sneakers: ask your health care provider if you are eligible. The program offers free gym membership to folks 65-plus. Save $700 per year, on average.

77. Save on Bulbs: replace 40 incandescent bulbs with LEDs and you could save $1,500 over their ten-year life span.

78. Donate Stock, not Cash: say you give $5K worth of stock to your place of worship that you paid $1K years ago. If you sold the shares then donated the cash, you’d owe $1K in capital gains taxes if you’re in the 25 percent tax bracket. Donate the stock and you avoid the capital gains tax.

79. Drink the Office Coffee: if you spend $4 a day at Starbucks that $1K a year just for workdays. Avoid Starbucks and save $1K annually.

80. Seek Out Property Tax Breaks: most states offer some type of property tax exemption for homeowners over 65, including rebates, caps on assessed value, and property tax rate or assessment freezes. NY for example, will lower your property tax by 50 percent if you make $29K or less annually. That break could save you $7K annually.

81. Haggle with Your Real Estate Agent: there is no law that says agents must get 6 percent of the selling price. In today’s seller’s market, agents might accept splitting 5 percent. Save $5K selling a $500K home.

82. Wait on a Mattress Sale: never buy a department store mattress at regular price. Those stores regularly have steep discounts. A recent sale at a national chain store saw the price of a queen-size mattress and box spring set marked down from $3,589 to $1,749. Savings total $1,780.

83. Dodge Convenience Fees: many parents don’t realize until too late that lots of colleges charge a fee averaging 2.62 percent if you pay tuition and other costs with a credit card. Avoid a $1,310 fee on a $50K annual college bill or private school buy avoiding using your credit card.

84. Pay for Performance Not Prestige: go with Toyota, Nissan or Honda, not high-end Lexus, Infiniti or Acura models from the same manufacturers. A 2018 Toyota Camry XLE V6 listed at $34,400 for example, has the same engine as a 2018 Lexus ES 350 that lists for $38,950. Car comparison sites like Edmunds.com give them nearly identical ratings. Savings total $4,550.

85. Shorten Your Mortgage: the average mortgage rate in June was 4.78 percent for 30 years and 4.17 percent for 15 years. A $200K mortgage would cost you $1,047 a month for 30 years or $1,496 a month for 15 years. Yes, that’s more, but the 15-year loan saves you almost $108,000 in interest, or an average of $7,200 each year for 15 years.

86. Drive Don’t Fly: that is, if your family vacation is less than 500 miles away. Four tickets from Washington, DC to Cincinnati over a recent week cost about $315 each. Gas for driving would have been under $70. That would save you $1,190 – and you’d have your car and gear with you.

87. Take a Farming Vacation: learn about organic farming and enjoy a trip overseas by volunteering to work with World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A room and food are free. You could easily save $1,500 over a week at hotels and restaurants.

88. Negotiate Car Lease: always make a deal based on the full price of the lease, not the monthly rate. You can negotiate among dealerships based on overall cost, and go with the best deal. Save $1K over the lease of a car.

89. Cut College Costs: state universities charge by the credit hour but accept credits from community colleges. Twelve credit hours at the University of Maryland, for example, cost $4,224. Take the same basic classes at nearby Montgomery College for $1,728. Save $2,496.

90. Free Hearing Test: take a confidential hearing test by phone every year.  Go to aarp.org/hearing

91. Save on British Airways: AARP members save $65 to $200 on tickets bought online to over 130 cities.

92. Save on Cirque Du Soleil: AARP members save 15 to 20 percent on tickets to select shows, some conditions may apply.

93. Seniors can Save with Grocery Coupons: AARP members can print free coupons from leading brands at the Grocery Coupon Center powered by Coupons.com

Reprinted from AARP Bulletin, July 2018.