Friendship Has Its Limits

by Erin Biba

Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it-cursor hovering over the Share button-you likely considered how your friends were going to react.

"People are going to like this," you thought. "Maybe I'll even get a few comments." Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? I'm taking bets on the answer. And my money is on never.

Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you're influencing - or trying to influence - how the world views you. Each carefully crafted 140-character message that goes out into the metaverse fills a publicly accessible database that defines you to people you've never met. In the end, it isn't who you really are. It's the hilarious, adorable, fascinating, intelligent, so-worth-Friending version of you. Social media isn't about having a conversation with people you know. It's about advertising yourself. It's not social; it's media.

Real conversations don't happen in public. You don't go to a party and loudly tell strangers about your recent bout of crippling depression. Or the fact that you just can't seem to trust people enough to make a true connection with a partner. No, the kinds of conversations you have in mixed company are edited for content. You tell people what you think they want to hear.

Mostly that means telling them interesting bits that are designed to make them like you. Like that time you locked yourself out of the house in your pajamas on a rainy night. (You're so funny and humble! We all just love how you can laugh at yourself!) The world of social media is just like that. Even a closed network (like an invitation-only Twitter feed or a private Facebook profile) is a group of people you've decided you want to like you. They don't want to hear about your irritable bowel syndrome. Not now. Not ever.

The idea that we're having a "conversation" online gets even more absurd as your network gets larger. You might have heard of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. He's got a number. According to Dunbar, humans are cognitively capable of connecting with only 150 or so people at any given time. In other words, your brain is only big enough to hold personal information about a limited number of people. Everyone else is just noise. Even Facebook agrees with Dunbar, sort of: It doesn't allow users more then 5,000 "friends." The assumption is that once you're linked to that many people, your network is no longer populated by real connections. Your real friend would call you in tears to pick her up from a car accident; your Facebook friend would simply post a photo of her cast and a sad-face emoticon. You feel sorry for her, but you don't experience the panic that comes from witnessing someone's distress firsthand.

Dunbar isn't the only one who believes that managing relationships on a large scale is impossible. In 2009, sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst concluded a long-running study looking at how we manage our real-world social networks. Over the course of seven years, we replace 48 percent of our friends with new ones, Mollenhorst found, though the total number in our network never changes. In other words, there's only so much room for new people in your life. And you're certainly not replacing one of your IRL friends-who actually knows you-with some random person who started following you on Twitter.

Those randoms, by the way, end up being a substantial part of our audience. In a study by UK gadget website Good Mobile Phones, which queried more then 1,500 Facebook users, 60 percent of participants said they no longer knew 20 percent of their "friends," and 50 percent responded that they actually speak with only 20 percent of them. The average Facebook user has only about 130 friends. So, if we're spending most of our time online talking to people we don't even know, how deep can the conversation ever get?

Dan Schawbel, a branding consultant, says we are all constantly building our brands online, whether we like it or not. "The Internet is your permanent record," he says. But while many of your witticisms and clever observations remain for posterity, searchable by Google, the conversations around them are fleeting. The public Twitter replies get replaced by new ones, and comments on your Facebook feed shrink to make room for fresh ones. All that really counted was your initial post and how it affected everyone's opinion of you.

The best evidence that social media isn't really about personal connection? Marketers love it. It seems like every business from taco trucks to GE is hoping to use social media to put a personal face on its brand. The truth is, my personal Twitter feed isn't all that different from @wired, the brand central station of this magazine's social media presence. We both post links to stories we think our followers will like. We both update with anecdotes about people we know. And we both choose our words carefully before we post them to be sure they mesh with how we want the public to perceive us.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to have a personal brand. It's what the Internet is best at. But no matter how you slice it, a social network is a public place. And posting there is like choosing what T-shirt to wear or how to cut your hair: It's another way to control how the world sees you. You are not your Facebook page or your Twitter feed. They're just snippets of you. And no one ever had a real, honest conversation with a snippet.

PS: You should totally follow me on Twitter (@erinbiba). Everyone agrees I'm way more hilarious and adorable there than in real life.

PPS: You can follow my editor on Twitter (@ablackshear). Everyone agrees that he's not that funny or witty.

by Erin Biba
Wired, August 2011, p83

This Beautiful Life

Written in high-definition prose, Helen Schulman’s new novel, This Beautiful Life (HarperColins), presents every parent’s nightmare. The family quartet of This Beautiful Life is a compact Upper West Side enlightened, progressive nuclear unit. The father, Richard, is a super-competent Mr. Cool; his wife, Elizabeth, is a harried multi-tasker navigating the treacherous lanes of playdates, private school, and competitive motherhood; their children are adopted Chinese daughter Coco and tousled teenager Jake. The house of cards (shown on the cover) symbolically collapses with just one mouse click after a nubile eighth-grader sends Jake a skeevy video, Jake thoughtlessly forwards it to a classmate, and the video goes viral. Before you know it, cultural warfare has broken out and The New York Observer, the New York Post, and Gawker have turner werewolf on everyone involved. Far more intense and specifically observed than any soap opera or morality lesson, This Beautiful Life astringently peels away the panic and dissatisfaction of staying apace in Manhattan’s fast track in the ago of Bloomberg, where maintaining the trappings of success itself becomes a form of serfdom.

review by James Wolcott
Vanity Fair, August 2011, p48

The Persuader - What Harriet Beecher Stowe wrought

What does it take to persuade—to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they live? We're often told that American society is polarized as never before, with civility in shreds and partisanship so corrosive that government has become nearly inoperable. But this year marks the sesquicentennial of a moment when politics truly failed and the American government splintered. Between 1861 and 1865, Americans did more than hurl verbal brickbats across the political divide; they fired cannons and rifles, killing one another in astonishing numbers. And they did so, in part, because a large number of Americans had been persuaded that they could not live in a country that countenanced slavery.

Slavery had been a contentious issue in the United States from at least the time of its founding. The soaring words of the Declaration of Independence caused many people to pause over the spectacle of humankind being treated like property in the ostensible land of liberty. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, seemed to settle the issue, with compromises written into its text that protected slavery and made Union possible. Some of the most prominent members of the founding generation believed that slavery was a dying institution. Yet the debate after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, and the three-year struggle over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state, between 1819 and 1821, discredited such hopes: not only was slavery growing entrenched but the South intended to extend its dominion by carrying it west.

By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.

This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published "Uncle Tom's Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly," one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe's novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: "Is this the little woman who made this great war?" The historian David S. Reynolds, in his passionate "Mightier Than the Sword: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and the Battle for America" (Norton; $27.95), answers resoundingly in the affirmative. But the most fascinating part of his lively and perceptive cultural history is the account of how she did it.

Stowe, a deeply religious woman, claimed that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came to her "in visions," that she did not so much write it as receive it from God. But even before the novel was written God helped the process along by having her reared in a family that was the perfect incubator for her talent. Stowe, born on June 14,1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, was the seventh of the nine children of Lyman and Roxana Beecher. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher was born two years later. Harriet was five years old when her mother died of tuberculosis; Beecher, a prominent New England minister, remarried and had four more children.

Social reform was the Beecher family business. They produced progressive ministers, educators, writers, and a feminist agitator. Lyman Beecher recognized early on that his daughter Harriet was special, proclaiming her "a great genius" when she was just eight years old. Realizing that her talents might go to waste because of her gender, he wrote that he "would give a hundred dollars if she was a boy 6c Henry a girl—She is as odd—as she is intelligent 6c studious." Reynolds describes young Henry as "tongue-tied" and "seemingly slow," but Lyman Beecher need not have worried about either child. Stowe went on to become hugely influential in one of the few mediums available to women at the time, writing, and Henry Ward Beecher, the tongue-tied boy, became one of the century's most accomplished and celebrated preachers.

Reading and storytelling captivated Stowe from childhood. She read whatever books were available—even old theological tracts, though she found them somewhat tedious. The Arabian Nights provided more thrilling fare, as did Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," a series of stories about the development of Puritan New England. She wrote that they made me feel the very ground I trod on to be consecrated by some special dealing of God's providence."

This Puritan background was essential to Stowe's personality. It wasn't the anti-sex Puritanism of popular legend that gripped her; it was the levelling tradition that, as Reynolds writes, lent support to "radical independence and rebellion against authority." Puritanism in the North, he notes, helped spur "progressive movements against slavery, intemperance, and other social ills"—which is precisely what pro-slavery Southerners found so irritating about it. They thought of New Englanders as "law defying Puritans who endorsed all kinds of disruptive 'isms'— most dangerously, abolitionism."

Stowe's early life was as conventional as that of a member of the Beecher family could be. She was educated at female academies, including the Hartford Female Seminary, which her older sister Catherine had founded and ran. Stowe herself started teaching there in 1827, but in 1832, when her father became president of Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, she went along. It was a fateful decision, personally and professionally. Cincinnati was in the Upper South, close to the culture of slavery, and she began to hear stories that would provide templates for her most influential work. In Cincinnati, too, she met Calvin Stowe, whom Lyman Beecher had recruited to the faculty at Lane. Stowe and his wife, Eliza, became great friends with the Beechers. Eliza died in 1834, and two years later Calvin and Harriet married.

The couple had seven children, and Harriet wrote stories to supplement her husband's small income, lamenting, "I am but a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping." When the couple's son Charley died, in 1849, at eighteen months, Stowe began, as Reynolds writes, her "fixation on Jesus Christ as the humble sufferer, the grand symbol of the burdens borne by the lowliest members of society." She explored this theme in a number of short stories and, of course, in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," when she portrayed the title character, an enslaved man, as a Christ figure. She said that losing Charley made her understand "what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."

Stowe's religious fervor, combined with what she learned about slavery, produced her "visions." Visions and spiritualism were accepted parts of life in nineteenth-century America. Calvin Stowe himself spoke about having had visions of "aerial forms that passed through walls" from the time he was a child. At one point, the couple believed that Calvin's first wife, for whom Harriet had great affection, was communicating with them from beyond the grave. (Both welcomed the intrusions.) The first vision that led to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came in February of 1851. While taking Communion, Reynolds writes, Stowe "saw four figures: an old slave being whipped to death by two fellow slaves, who were goaded on by a brutal white man." The man being whipped would become Uncle Tom. The "brutal white man" would become Simon Legree. The novel that resulted appeared in forty-one weekly installments in a Washington-based anti-slavery newspaper from June, 1851, to March, 1852, when it was published as a book in two volumes.

Stowe said of the book that she had a "vocation to preach on paper," just as the men in her family preached in pulpits. It's a crucial point, because the Beecher men, especially Henry, had helped to modernize the art of preaching. They moved away from sermons that followed a strict trajectory and that discussed doctrine in a routine way. Instead, they relied on narrative. Telling stories from the pulpit made the message of the Gospels more accessible to congregations by using drawn-from-life vignettes, a staple of church services today. Stowe, too, understood how influential narrative could be, and with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public. As one Southern commentator noted, "Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author's views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme."

What was needed was a story with characters, fully realized, in whom readers would develop a stake. The novel's two plotlines, Northern and Southern, emphasize slavery's national reach. An enslaved woman, Eliza Harris, escapes north with her young son and joins her husband, George. Though out of the South, the Harrises must contend with the Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northerners to help return escaped slaves to their masters. Along the way, they meet friend and foe, in scenes meant to show the human capacity for empathy and for evil. The Southern plot centers on Uncle Tom, who, when his owners fall on hard times, is sold "down the river," away from his beloved wife and children. On the trip down, he saves the life of young Eva, prompting her father, Augustine St. Clare, to buy him. Tom and Eva, another of Stowe's Christ figures, become friends. While Eva is dying, St. Clare promises to free Tom but is killed before he can, and Tom falls into the hands of the villainous Simon Legree, with fatal consequences.

Stowe took pains not to demonize all Southerners, or beatify all Northerners. In her view, no one was corrupt by nature; the system of slavery spoiled everything and everyone it touched. But her story was effective because it directly assaulted Southern pretensions. Pro-slavery Southerners had been propagating a narrative of their own: slavery was a benevolent institution in which mentally inferior slaves were watched over by owners who treated them as part of their family. The Romans had had slaves, they argued, and the South was a new Rome. (Never mind the absence of the ancient civilization's great architectural, artistic, engineering, legal, and literary achievements.)

Stowe's novel exploded this myth of the South as a land of paternalistic slaveholders. Her description of Tom's sale down the river to the Deep South was an expression of slavery's core reality. The historian Steven Deyle has estimated that more than a million slaves were shipped from the Upper South to the Lower South between 1790 and 1860. "During this period, slave sales occurred in every southern city and village, and 'coffles' of slaves (gangs held together in chains) could be found on every southern highway, waterway, and railroad," Deyle writes. Without this domestic trade, the institution of slavery would have collapsed. More slaves were sold south than arrived on the North American continent via the infamous Middle Passage. They did not suffer the horrors of a transatlantic ocean voyage packed tight in a ship. But they did suffer the anguish of lost mothers, fathers, children, siblings, husbands, and wives. In what "family," Stowe's book asked, were members treated this way, sold off like cattle by their supposed "kin"?

The sexual mistreatment of enslaved women was a staple of abolitionist literature, and Stowe depicted it with particular force. The modesty of the age, however, allowed slavery's apologists to cast any who raised the subject as tasteless and crude. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson's eldest grandson, wrote with bitterness about Stowe in his late-in-life unpublished memoirs, and explicitly sought to equate the entire work with sordid sex:
Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's log cabin is a foul and atrocious Libel upon the slave holders of the Southern States, and was a garbage suited to the appetite of sectional hate. As true as if the description of the morals of New York, had been drawn from the five points or of Boston from its brothels.

Stowe's narrative was persuasive, however, because it fit with what many Americans were able to glean from their travels and knew from their experience of human nature. (What was the likely result of giving males control over the bodies of women who cannot say no to them?) Meanwhile, the Fugitive Slave Law made Northerners—by requiring them to return escaped slaves— an active part of slavery. It was harder to avoid the moral consequences of a system that all Americans were now being asked to allow to spread into the western part of the continent. In effect, Stowe raised with fellow-citizens the question she had asked herself: "This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country?" In the decade following the novel's publication, a growing segment of the population decided that it could not, even if it meant going to war.

Uncle Tom's Cabin" was the pinnacle of Stowe's literary career, but it was not the end of it. In addition to publishing, in 1853, "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," essentially a reply to white Southerners' charge that she had misrepresented the facts of slavery, she wrote Biblical stories, children's books, and travelogues. She died of a stroke in 1896, still a much honored figure. But "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had long since developed a life beyond the novel. Reynolds details the explosion of tie-ins, including "a host of merchandise known as Tomitudes" (everything from biscuit tins and earthenware plates to card games and snuffboxes), and the rise of wildly popular "Tom shows," stage adaptations of the book. Versions of the play which appeared in the eighteen-fifties remained largely true to Stowe's original, and were hugely influential in turning many working-class whites—historically hostile to blacks, with whom they felt in competition as laborers—against slavery. Not surprisingly, however, there were major changes in the plays during and after Reconstruction. Reynolds tells us that during the eigh-teen-eighties as many as fifty Tom troupes were touring the states, and that by the eighteen-nineties there were as many as five hundred. As the troupes grew in number, they began to display the American tendency toward excess, what Reynolds calls the " '-est' factor, a fascination with the biggest, smallest, thinnest, oldest, and most outrageous, which reflected the bumptious confidence of the rapidly expanding nation."

Real bloodhounds, with what Reynolds describes as their "droopy ears and soft expressions," did not provide enough drama for the chase scenes, so fiercer dogs were brought in. Some shows featured alligators and at least one elephant. P. T. Barnum got into the act and, when he merged with J. A. Bailey's circus, added the most bizarre twist: duplicate characters for each role, from Little Eva to Simon Legree. "Everything double but the prices!" one poster declared. That, as it turned out, was not enough for audiences, and some shows soon advertised three or four of each. Then there were productions with boxing matches interspersed: Uncle Tom would step out of character and go three rounds with another actor before returning to the play. The iconic characters Stowe created kept a powerful hold on the public consciousness, but they also became caricatures, their original proportions distorted.

Reynolds describes, with somewhat less power than in the early chapters, how the novel and its protagonists continued to transfix the public well into the twentieth century. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" influenced revolutionary movements around the globe, even as effective counter-narratives arose. D. W. Griffith, a consummate storyteller, began Hollywood's love affair with the romantic version of the white South in his groundbreaking film "The Birth of a Nation"; "Gone with the Wind" continued the tradition, portraying the South as a gracious land of happy slaves—with no hint of the endemic cruelty of American slavery.

Changing sensibilities about race also took a toll on the novel's prestige. James Baldwin excoriated Stowe in his 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," not least for her depiction of Uncle Tom as a Christ figure, suffering and dying at the hands of Simon Legree. Baldwin objected to the suggestion that blacks be passive in the face of white violence. In the coming decade, of course, black civil-rights leaders would decide to do just that as they sought to destroy Jim Crow in the South, and Baldwin would later write protest novels of his own.

In the past two decades, historians and literary critics have started to look at "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from the perspective of gender, keeping in mind how difficult it has been, and still is, for women's writing to be taken as seriously as men's. Jane Smiley, in a controversial essay, asked why Stowe's novel has been more harshly treated than works written by men which are just as dated and offensive in their treatment of race, notably "Huckleberry Finn." Reynolds himself takes on those who would minimize Stowe's influence because she was, as they suppose, a cultural rather than a political figure. Politics narrowly defined—who got voted into office, who wrote and voted on the bill, who belonged to this or that political club—leaves out an enormous amount. For one thing, it leaves out half the population, since for most of American history women were excluded from the direct exercise of political power.

That cultural life matters isn't merely an insight from the new social history. Lincoln explained it as well as anyone: "He who molds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes." As a woman, Stowe had no hope of making a statute. But, like Lincoln, she understood how change is effected in society, and she used what tools she had, offering a new narrative—she might say a new "vision"—that was explicitly moral and, in that sense, extra-legal: beyond the calculus of power and interest, and firmly in the realm of right and wrong. The novel's overtly religious appeal to the reader, sometimes cringe-inducing portrayal of blacks, and unabashed sentimentality may grate upon modern sensibilities. But Stowe knew things—heard things, saw things—that we, thanks in part to her, will never be forced to confront: American slavery as it was. Arguments will continue about the novel's literary value and about her handling of race. For all that, it's still possible to see "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for what its author intended it to be: a cri de coeur to the American people, one that forced them to ask what kind of country they wanted their nation to be. Fortunately, Stowe's answer to the question was persuasive.

review by Annette Gordon-Reed
New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011, p.120

IKEA’s little secret (!!?!!)

In Sweden, IKEA's factory workers are paid $19 per hour and get five weeks of paid vacation every year. In America? Not so much.

IKEA's Swedwood plant in Danville, Virginia is the most dangerous plant in the wood furniture industry -- workers there have suffered more than 1,536 days of lost work due to accidents on the job in a 30-month period. According to the LA Times, IKEA's Danville workers are paid as little as $8 an hour and face racial discrimination from their managers. Workers often find out on Friday night that they'll be forced to work for the entire weekend -- and if they can't make it, they face disciplinary action.

In Sweden, IKEA's factory workers are unionized, which is one reason they receive better wages and have a safer workplace -- but the company is going all out to prevent American workers from receiving those same rights and protections. Please sign the petition to tell IKEA to give its American workers the freedom to organize.

The workers in Danville have filed for an election to start a union of their own -- the election could come as soon as six weeks from now. But rather than pay its workers fair wages, Swedwood pays the notorious union-busting firm Jackson Lewis thousands of dollars a day to hold mandatory "captive audience meetings" with the Danville workers. At these meetings, the Jackson Lewis associates inundate the workers with anti-union propaganda and veiled threats that are backed up with random firings.

Here's the good news: The publicity surrounding this organizing drive has already made a difference -- last month, Swedwood announced that Danville workers would no longer be forced to work mandatory overtime. But Liz Cattaneo of American Rights at Work stresses that continued public pressure is extremely important: "If IKEA thinks the public isn't paying attention, they're going to play hardball … throughout the election process - which could mean more firings and more union busting."

Now that the workers have filed for a union election, you can bet IKEA will redouble its efforts to squash their rights. They need our support now more than ever.

Please sign the petition to tell IKEA's head of Corporate PR that we are paying attention, and we expect IKEA to treat its American workers just as well as its Swedish workers:

http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-ikea-to-respect-its-workers

True/False: Turkey bacon is more nutritious than pork

FALSE: the hefty salt and fat found in some turkey bacon negate its positives. Bacon is a prime example of why label-reading is important. Pork bacon comes in smoky, super-thick, fatty slabs but also in naturally leaner center-cut slices; the latter can contain as little as 60 calories, 1.5g sat fat, and 260mg sodium per slice. Turkey bacon also wanders all over the nutrition map. A slice of Jennie-O’s ultra-lean version is a nutrition bargain, at 20 calories, 0g sat fat, and 120mg sodium. But others can contain the same sat fat as center-cut pork bacon – and even more sodium.

WHAT TO DO: If you like pork, choose a lean, high-flavor cut. If you need less fat, find a lean, lower-sodium turkey product.

source: Cooking Light, July 2011, p.99

Lacrimosa

Lacrimosa dies illa,
qua resurget ex favilla
judicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus,
pie Jesu Domine,
dona eis requiem.

Help your kids reach their potential

Consider the benefits of California's official 529 College Savings Plan

The ScholarShare College Savings Plan can help give you a way to create a careful, consistently maintained college savings strategy. All your earnings are federal and California State income tax free when used for qualified higher education expenses, which may make a substantial difference when it comes time to pay for tuition, books, and room and board.

Consider opening a ScholarShare Plan Account

What do you get with a ScholarShare Plan?
* Tax advantages can help you save more Automatic contributions as low as $15 per month*
* Flexible investment options including age-based portfolios
* Savings can be used at colleges nationwide
* Guidance from Fidelity to help keep you on track
Call 800.544.5248 or visit ScholarShare.com/CAsaves to get all of the benefits of California's official 529 College Savings Plan.

Carolyn M. Clancy
Executive Vice President
Personal and Workplace Investing Services
Fidelity Investments
Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC

Zeny Marie Agullana
Executive Director
ScholarShare Investment Board

Guidance provided by Fidelity is educational in nature, is not individualized, and is not intended to serve as the primary or sole basis for your investment or tax-planning decisions.

Please carefully consider the Plan's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. Contact Fidelity for a free Fact Kit, or view one online. Read it carefully before you invest.

The ScholarShare College Savings Plan is offered by the ScholarShare Investment Board, an agency of the State of California, and managed by Fidelity Investments. If you or the designated beneficiary is not a California resident, you may want to consider, before investing, whether your state or the beneficiary's home state offers its residents a plan with alternate state tax advantages or other benefits.

Neither the principal deposited nor the investment return is guaranteed by the State of California, the ScholarShare Investment Board, Fidelity Investments or any affiliate thereof, or the federal government or any agency thereof.

Units of the Portfolios are municipal securities and may be subject to market volatility and fluctuation.

* Periodic investment plans do not guarantee a profit or protect against a loss in a declining market.

Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, Member NYSE, SIPC, 900 Salem Street, Smithfield, RI 02917

The Futility of Rooftop Solar Panels

Q: Lithium and other batteries are some of the great 21st-century technologies, and China as made them a priority in a way the US hasn't. Do you think the US can compete?

A: The current lithium technology was invented by a guy at the University of Texas; innovative battery companies are overwhelmingly here in the US. There are several that venture capitalist Vinod Khosla backs. There are people like Donald Sado way at MIT, whom I back directly. I think if you want a leading indicator that you can feel good about, look at the amount of IQ working on energy today and the kinds of tools those smart people have to communicate and to create simulations. Compared to 20 years ago, it's night and day. In terms of innovation IQ and risk taking and starting up new companies, the US blows everybody else away.

You could have the government throw money at the most politically favored guy in the country to go build a battery factory. And there are billions of dollars that have been assigned to that waste. Or you could actually back people who have better battery ideas.

You have to think of two types of batteries. One is a battery for a car, and it has to be light and crash-proof, but the total amount of energy it has to store is not all that large. Now, that doesn't give you an environmental benefit unless your grid has somehow changed. But at least it gives you a security benefit, because you're sourcing your coal for your grid locally. The harder battery problem is the second type-the battery. If you're getting, say, 50 percent of your energy from solar, and the sun only shines during the day, then you have to be storing enough energy for the night. And that is a mind-blowing problem. I mean, that's more demanding by a factor of a hundred than any other battery challenge we have today.

I think people deeply underestimate what a huge problem this day-night issue is if you're trying to design an energy system involving solar technology that's more than just a hobby. You know, the sun shines during the day, and people turn their air conditioners on during the day, so you can catch some of that peaking load, particularly if you get enough subsidies. It's cute, you know; it's nice. But the economics are so, so far from making sense. And yet that's where subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment- this is true in Europe and the United States-not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of basic research.

Interview with Bill Gates by Wired Editor in Chief, Chris Anderson
Wired, July 2011, p.108

NAACP Honors Clarence Mitchell, Jr.

Living in the 21st century, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Some are well known. Others seem to disappear from the pages of history. One of those giants whose name has faded from recent memory is Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. (1911-1984).

Nicknamed the 101st senator by colleagues on Capitol Hill, Mitchell led the fight for justice and equality as a lobbyist for the NAACP. As chief of the Washington Bureau from 1950 to 1978, his work in building relationships on both sides of the aisle led to the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter awarded Mitchell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the country.

According to current Washington Bureau Chief and lobbyist, Hilary O. Shelton, anyone who works in the interest of justice and equality owes a debt of gratitude to Mitchell. He is not a household name among civil rights pioneers, Shelton notes, because he often worked diligently behind the scenes.

"Even though he has been gone from the position for over 30 years, people know him on Capitol Hill," Shelton said.

Mitchell's responsibility was to advocate for the NAACP's civil rights legislative agenda to Congress, the White House and government agencies, Shelton said. Mitchell walked a tightrope for decades, striking a delicate balance of persistence and humility in order to make inroads across party lines and in the face of hostility. He registered to vote as an independent so as not to appear biased toward either party. At the time he took the job, most Blacks in the U.S. identified with the Republican Party and notorious segregationists Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms were Dixiecrats.

According to his son, Michael, Mitchell started out with aspirations of becoming a physician. Upon graduating from Lincoln University in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, Mitchell took a job with the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper to make ends meet. After covering a lynching on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Mitchell was compelled to answer the call to justice.

Mitchell's relative obscurity is the reason two native Baltimoreans took it upon themselves to make sure that the man, his work and his legacy were acknowledged on what would have been his 100th birthday. Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, immediate past president of the Baltimore City NAACP chapter, and Michael Johnson, director of the Paul Robeson Institute, collaborated to not only recognize, but also to educate people about the work of native son Mitchell.

"When you look at civil rights and voting rights and housing - if it wasn't for him, none of those bills would've passed," said Cheatham. According to Cheatham, Morgan State University was able to survive because of Mitchell's support. He also helped secure an engineering school on the college campus, which now bears his name. The main courthouse in Baltimore as well as an admissions building at the University of Maryland are also named for Mitchell.

Civil rights was a family affair. Mitchell's wife, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, established the youth component of the NAACP and was the first Black woman to practice law in Maryland. Mitchell's mother-in-law, Lillie M. Carroll Jackson, established the Baltimore City NAACP chapter and presided over the largest NAACP chapter from 1935 to 1970.

The weeklong centennial celebration honoring Mitchell's life included an educational program for students in Baltimore City public schools, a panel discussion, church services and a discussion with Prof. Denton L. Watson, author of Lion in the Lobby: Clarence Mitchell Jr. 's Struggle for the Passage of Civil Rights Laws. The celebration culminated with a birthday breakfast on March 8 featuring Shelton as the keynote speaker and a tour of the Clarence Mitchell Jr. courthouse in Baltimore.

NAACP Maryland State Conference President Gerald Stansbury acknowledged Mitchell's lasting legacy. "I think it's amazing that his whole family had a legacy of activism," said Stansbury. "He was a freedom fighter. I think the NAACP was very fortunate to have [Mitchell] be a part of it."

by Cindy Barnes-Thomas
reprinted from Spring 2011, The Crisis, p41

1012 Natchez

review by Eisa Ulen

Nioki McElroy has published a memoir that often reads like a personal testimony brought on during an ordinary conversation with an elder eager to share her true-life tales. A PhD. who has not attended Wintergreen but who also chose to share her personal narrative with readers, McElroy bears witness to her own life in 1012 Natchez: A Memoir of Grace, Hardship, and Love.

By telling what she saw, and how she saw it, as she came of age, married and started her family in the mid-20th century, McElroy resists the silencing of Black women who experience America differently than the mainstream - even when those Black women become university professors.

When she writes about the beginning of her husband's "own Black consciousness that defined the man he was to become," for example, she also testifies to the state of public affairs affecting countless Black people who were never given the opportunity to write their truths:

"Mac attended Chicago Public School System for grade school in the 1920s and '30s. The schools were segregated - his classmates were Black and the teachers were White. Black teachers were rare since very few Blacks were admitted to Chicago Teachers College, where teachers received their training at that time ... Mac never forgot the way he felt during the year when a disinterested White teacher never bothered to learn his name."McElroy also remembers and tells of the May 1930 lynching of George Hughes, one of too many Black men who were never given a fair trial for the alleged crime of assaulting a White woman, and whose stories of injustice are still insufficiently documented.

McElroy helps continue the work started by campaigner Ida B. Wells when she recounts not only Hughes' lynching, but also the riot that followed - a riot that destroyed the most prosperous sections of a small African American community under siege by hostile Whites. McElroy's work is accessible and her prose is often conversational, creating a tone that is familiar in its frank recounting of the past. I wish the book were longer, that the author had more fully developed some of her ideas and filled in some narrative holes. Nevertheless, McElroy's specific experience in a world dominated by wealth, manhood, and Whiteness belongs to all Black women who struggle to maintain an authentic identity in American society.

------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34

Circle of Sisters Bearing Words, Bearing Witness

Review by Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Through their work, literary, ambitious Black women writers remember and tell. They bear witness to their lives and the lives of other African Americans. Whether they are crafting fiction or nonfiction, these women tell truths - not one truth, but the many truths that together form the diverse experiences of Black American womanhood. Two books, one a memoir and the other a collection of short essays by Black women writers, work in this tradition. Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers, edited by Joanne Veal Gabbin, is an anthology of first-person essays crafted by academicians.

According to these sisters, the Ivory Tower has historically been hostile to the presence of Black women educators. In response to consistent subjugation and" othering" by the dominant gaze of their less-than-collegial university colleagues, these women come together to gaze lovingly upon each other at a regular retreat established by Gabbin called the Wintergreen Women Writers' Collective.

In the first essay of the collection, "A Distant Star Called Possibility," Nikki Giovanni says this about Wintergreen:

"We played cards, swam,
walked in the woods (dodging the bears),
read poetry to the group,
cooked and ate,
and it was great.
It was supposed to be a onetime thing,
but we all said: Let's do it again.
And we have been doing it for the last twenty years ...
It is a safe place.
To relax.
To be surrounded by love.
To be.
A haven.
Where we cheer each other on...
riding the night winds,
our hearts skip across the clouds,
coming to rest on a distant star called possibility;
we arrive at Wintergreen.
Good for us."

By contributing their personal truths to one book, these women open wide the sacred circle of female bonding and include us all in the reassuring rhythms of female talk. Many of the anthology's contributors were firsts or among the firsts in their departments or even among the entire college faculty. Isolation, marginalization and the struggle to secure full-time tenure-track work without the benefit of mentors within the university system compelled the contributors to come together at Wintergreen and be reaffirmed.

But for the contributors to this collection, their journeys to a professional life of engagement with words, ideas and their own work as writers began much sooner than their first trips to Wintergreen. These narratives document pivotal moments in their own lives that led them to the writer's life. For some, those moments were violent, such as the time in 1950 that Gabbin "could not have seen the metal pipe that [a white boy] took from behind his back and crashed into my head" or when, in 1954, an adult raged at a young Janus Adams for integrating the local school: "She spat at me and tore my dress." Some of those moments are also beautiful, as when Nikky Finney's Grandmother Beulah gave her"the hands and heart to be a poet" or Paule Marshall's mother's friends would gather at the kitchen table and talk as "a kind of magic rite, a form of juju ..." And sometimes, those pivotal moments are as banal as Kendra Hamilton's "six week writing assignment, the kind tenth-grade teachers hand out every day" or the Friday evening in 1995 that Marilyn Sanders Mobley"decided to clean my closet."

Together, the 25 contributors, including Toi Derricotte, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans and Opal Moore, have generated a line of narratives that forms a circle, what Karla FC Holloway calls in her essay "a sanctuary of my own making. Words like a womb." Indeed, there is an impulse in the work collected in Shaping Memories that insists on rebirth.

-------
Eisa is author of the novel Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn. www.EisaUlen.com
Reprinted from the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p34

From Rebirth To The Age of Social Responsibility

review by Darryl Wellington

If the generation of Black scribes who toiled and published – and struggled with the predetermined expectations of race-conscious audiences and editors, and still published-between 1934 and 1960 was "the indignant generation," what was the generation that preceded them? The sweeter generation? The art-for-arts-sake generation? Were they largely an unindignant generation? Of course not. The generation of Black writers and artists of the 1920s have a distinctive group name. They were not unaggrieved. Their period of flourishing artistic creativity became familiarly known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The primary engine behind the Harlem Renaissance was a savvy White patron, publicist and impresario, Carl Van Vechten. In the next decade, the major philanthropic power -"the most important grant-giving body to African American intellectuals in the 1930s and ·1940s - was the Rosenwald Fund, based in Chicago, whose institutional largesse supplanted Van Vechten's patronage. The names changed, but nothing else? Lawrence P. Jackson's exhaustive The Indignant Generations is a record of how much changed. A subtle and essential cultural shift underscores The Indignant Generation's generational marker. It may have been as simple, yet as complex as distinctive differences in emphasis. The writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance tended to stress the elevation of Black identity, and the achievement of a sense of self-esteem equal to White America. The movement, which believed itself to be thoroughly modern, in vogue and progressive, was not untouched by the headiness and decadence that characterized the roaring '20s - hence it was not without its penchant to romanticize ecstatic jazz, exotic Africa, decorative art and sexual liberation. To be Black, yet full of self-confidence and in tune with the bohemian ideals of the roaring '20s was to be liberated, wasn't it?

Evidently not, said the next generation, for whom the romance soured, or rather, the faith that America's entrenched racism could be resolved by high art and bohemian swagger faded. The stock market crash rocked all America. The Great Depression legitimized class politics. The Black writers and artists of the '30s and early'40s regrouped after the socio-economic shocks (which hit hardest minority groups at the bottom of the barrel) and what little assistance they could find was provided by the Works Progress Administration writers and artists programs, the Rosenwald Fund, a few Black scholarly and political journals (such as The Crisis) and (in ways that should not be underestimated) the Communist Party USA. Sometimes domineering and manipulative, the Communist Party USA still championed causes such as the Scottsboro boys, and throughout the '40s - Lawrence P. Jackson frequently notes - "the typical young Black writer was still faced with only Communist front groups or racial uplift magazines to publish their work." The aesthetic ideal of the Communists of the day was social realism, and while Black writers frequently clashed with rigid CPUSA expectations, they were forged by them. The novels they wrote and plays they produced were also forged by offense that in the modern world – because they believed themselves to be as prescient and progressive in their thinking as had the members of the Harlem Renaissance - segregation was still the law of the land. To contemplate the situation was to know that indignation had reached an apocalyptic boiling point. Out of social irritants, and an intellectual impasse was born the late great protest novel.

The cultural and artistic watershed was Richard Wright's unrelentingly bleak and realistic Native Son, so challenging in its time that the entire indignant generation is sometimes characterized as "the Richard Wright school." "To name the period after its star is yet a misnomer," Jackson explains, both because of the diversity of perspectives within the period, and because the reaction against Wright was just as powerful as his initial influence. By the late fifties, thanks to critical responses championed by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, protest writing was out. A bouillabaisse of new criticism, idealistic social integrationism and complex ambiguity was in. Then another sea change hit, called Black power. The militant '60s Black aesthetic surpassed the indignant generation by foreswearing any identification with middle-class America at all.

The social realism of the'40s came and went. But who were the writers and books that defined old-school social realism, hammering at the walls of segregation? Try The Street by Ann Petry, Youngblood by John Oliver Killens, Stranger and Alone by J. Saunders Redding, Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith, to name a few. But good luck finding the books. The Indignant Generation is a study of a generation lost in history, whose accomplishments have often gone out of print. The sheer number of titles is astonishing; among them must be a few neglected masterpieces.

Lawrence P. Jackson – previously best known for his biography of Ralph Ellison - has done a masterful and comprehensive job of documenting and instigating a reconsideration of an angry generation who still believed that storytelling was a social responsibility. it's an idea that - reexamined in the era of Oliver Stone and Spike Lee- doesn't seem so old-fashioned at all. The works need to be reassessed in the light of day, not indignation.


- Darryl Loenzo Wellington lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has published his work in Dissent, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Christian Science Monitor.
This review appears in the Spring, 2011 issue of The Crisis, p.33

Why do I have to read these books?

"You are reading these books because you're in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read." If you hold a certain theory of education, this answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it's easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can't be captured in a one-time assessment, like an IQ test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they're sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious-no matter how smart they might be in the IQ sense-those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types.. At the end of the process, graduates get a. score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It's important therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

I could have answered the question in a different way. I could have said, ''You're reading these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else." This reflects a different theory of college, a theory that runs like this: In a society that encourages its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being. College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing.

excerpt from “Live and Learn – Why We Have College” by Louis Menand
New Yorker magazine, 6 June 2011, p.74

Imagine

What happens in neighborhoods where the self esteem
has been over shadowed by the decay
and the children no longer play the way they used to.

Where young boys choose to follow figures that had no father figures.
A place where lives have been reduce to mere names on a nigger wall
a lot of dead shames on a nigger wall
‘cause most of my childhood friends died over some dumb shit.

It’s like we all on some slum shit
What happened to that “We Shall Overcome” shit?
Nigger, where I’m from, shit, they done torn down the projects
And took away neighborhood sports.

It’s a place where little black boys put on jerseys and shorts.
Dream big about stardom on fine hard wood courts
but await to the harsh reality of the strip unfinished inner city floor
where life splinters.

Cold winters are sheltered by crack houses
instead of recreation centers that they claim to not have the paper
to keep open for operation.

The deconstruction of the black family has been in
perpetuation ever since Willie Lynch has set his theory in motion.
Decharacterization was his sole promotion.

Therefore, if you take the basketball out of his face and
put the coke in its place he’ll still score.
What’s a young boy when he doesn’t want to do wrong but there’s
a lock on the right door.

When he has the heart of a soldier, the aggression of a prize fighter
but no one has taught him what to fight for, see
most our families are fatherless and quite poor.

So we miss out on meals as well as kisses and hugs
You’ve got the audacity to cut the funding for the
facilities to keep us off the streets
then ask us Why we sell drugs?

But imagine if niggers put down their dice and guns
and picked up their daughters and sons and
put a little love right there where the hate is.

Imagine if niggers had chance to become accountants
before being taught what the difference between wet and dry is.
Imagine if these little inner city kids had the same type of schools
as these little rich kids had way out there in the sticks.

Imagine if niggers had the chance to
learn chemistry for real before we learn how to whip 7½ out of six.
Imagine if these little black girls could go to these dance schools for free
and learn to love the dream of that Broadway show.

Imagine if she wasn’t forced into a game where you assume a
filthy name to put your soul and ass up for show.
Imagine she was taught to love herself, imitate no one,
demand and demonstrate respect when she walks though the door.
Imagine if she watched the tellie and saw herself during the prime time hour instead
of the four o’clock video whore.

Imagine.

-------------------------
Black Ice spoken word “Imagine” is his take on how the lack of opportunities in the inner city deprives young men and women of a positive self image and self respect.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Darling I'm kill
I'm in puddle on the floor
Waiting for you to return
Oh what a trill
Vacillations good lord
How you tease
How you leave me to burn
It's so deadly my dear
The power of having you near

Until the day ends
Until the world falls away
Until you say there will be no more good-byes
I see it in your eyes
Tomorrow never dies

Darling you've won
It's no fun
Martinis, girls, and guns
It's murder on our love affair
You bet your life
Every night
While you chase every morning die
You're not the only spy out there
It's so deadly my dear
The power of wanting you near

Until the day ends
Until the world falls away
Until you say there will be no more good-byes
I see it in your eyes
Tomorrow never dies

lyrics by Mitchell Froom and Sheryl Crow

270 Seconds To A Better Marriage

Here is a three-step approach to a more satisfying marriage:

MORNING

First thing, take 90 seconds to give her the greatest good morning possible: “Good morning. I love you.” And if she’s asleep, you can lower your voice and whisper, “I love you. Have an awesome day.” She’ll hear you anyway.

AFTER WORK

Right when you get home, focus on her for a full 90 seconds. If she’s happy, you go happy; if she’s low, you go low, and make sure you look her in the eyes long enough to discern her eye color. This says, I value you, I need you.

NIGHT

Sometime during the last thirty minutes before bed, take 90 seconds to engage fully with her. Do not talk about children, money, or work. Don’t talk about the past at all. Look at her, stroke her hair, snuggle up to her, tell her you love her.

CONCLUSION

90 seconds in the morning, 90 seconds after work (or any time you’ve been away from her for at least two hours), and 90 seconds at night. That’s how you bond. After seven to ten days, the marriage will change for the positive. Guaranteed.

- by Jim Fannin, reprinted from Esquire, May 2011, p152

The Making and Remaking of Malcolm X

by David Remnick

On summer nights, in 1963, Malcolm X drove his blue Oldsmobile from Mosque No. 7, the Harlem headquarters of the Nation of Islam, to an apartment building on Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, where a freelance writer named Alex Haley sat waiting for him in an eight-by-ten-foot studio. There, the two would remain until early morning. Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm — tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive. “My whole life has been a chronology of changes,” Malcolm told Haley one night, and, in a few months, he would transform himself yet again, becoming El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim.

When Haley first met Malcolm, in 1959, he had recently retired from a twenty-year career in the Coast Guard, and had embarked on a career as a journalist. He soon published articles about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm in Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Haley was not at all in accord with the Nation’s theology or its vehement ideology of racial separatism. He was a liberal Republican, an integrationist, who admired A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — the mainstream civil-rights leaders whom Malcolm denounced as “stooges” and “lackeys.”

“You’re another of the white man’s tools sent to spy!” Malcolm told Haley at their first meeting. Despite their obvious differences, though, Malcolm thought that Haley’s articles had been fair. After interviewing Malcolm for Playboy, Haley persuaded him to collaborate on an “as told to” autobiography. They would split a twenty-thousand-dollar advance from Doubleday.

The first sessions on Grove Street were frustrating, as Malcolm spent countless hours praising the wisdom of Elijah Muhammad, and avoided all mention of his own life. Then came a night when Haley asked Malcolm, “I wonder if you’d tell me something about your mother?” Malcolm’s voice softened. Walking in a tight circle, he said, “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat.” He began to tell the story of his life, how the family’s house was burned to the ground by the white racists of the Black Legion, how his white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer (“That’s no realistic goal for a nigger!”). They talked until dawn, accumulating much of a first chapter, which Haley titled “Nightmare.”

Haley’s ambition was to write a bestseller; in Malcolm, he recognized not a great man, necessarily, but a great story, even a dangerous one. By 1964, Malcolm had fallen out with the Nation of Islam, and he became convinced, rightly, that he did not have long to live. Followed all his public life by the F.B.I. and the police, Malcolm was now being pursued by the Nation, with its thuggish “pipe squads,” the Fruit of Islam. Haley cared for Malcolm, but he cared for the book no less. “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book,” he wrote Malcolm in a long letter. “There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?” In order to fend off deadlines, meanwhile, Haley wrote buoyantly to his agent and editors, insisting that the book would “sweep the market like wildfire”: “For this man is so hot, so HOT, a subject . . . this book is so pregnant with millions or more sales potential, including to make foreign rights hotly bid for!”

On February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights, multiple assassins fired shotguns and pistols at Malcolm as he stepped to the lectern for a speech. Two hours after hearing the news, Haley wrote to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The publisher, Nelson Doubleday, fearing for the lives of his staff, cancelled his deal with Haley; Barney Rosset, the bold and ingenious proprietor of Grove Press, picked up the contract. He would not be sorry. Between 1965 and 1977, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” sold six million copies worldwide, and the book continues to sell briskly, both to general readers and to students for whom it is required reading. In 1992, Spike Lee set off a bout of “Malcolmania,” with his three-hour-plus film. In its wake, people as unlikely as Dan Quayle talked sympathetically about Malcolm. A poll showed that eighty-four per cent of African-Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four saw Malcolm as “a hero for black Americans today.” The video for Public Enemy’s “Shut ’Em Down” put Malcolm’s face on the dollar bill. A vivid but secondary figure in his own time, Malcolm X had achieved the status of an icon. And he did it with a book that he never lived to see published.

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject’s fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits — “the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect “chicken money” from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

It’s indisputable that the family suffered terribly, from both racism and humiliating poverty. This was an era of lynchings, Jim Crow, and economic depression. Malcolm says he was sometimes “dizzy” with hunger. His mother became a barely functional depressive, given to mumbling to herself for hours in a rocking chair; she was eventually institutionalized. Malcolm, who was sent off to a series of foster homes and an all-white school, scarcely saw her for twenty-five years. Even if Malcolm’s autobiography intensified the colors of his story, the general grimness of “Nightmare”—his sense of deprivation and hurt, his rage at white society—is borne out by Marable’s scholarship.

Malcolm worked for a while on Pullman trains, clowning for the passengers, and eventually landed in Roxbury and Harlem, where he was a small-time gangster, with a conk and a zoot suit, pimping and selling dope, hanging out with musicians, hustlers, and prostitutes at famous nightspots like the Roseland Ballroom and Small’s Paradise. Like Charlie Parker before him, he washed dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. He not only ran numbers but wagered on them, too: “Every day I would gamble all of my tips — as high as fifteen and twenty dollars—on the numbers, and dream of what I would do when I hit.”

Although the autobiography portrays him as apolitical during these years, this seems to have been a dramatic device to signal ignorance before enlightenment. Marable tracked down a reliable witness who says that Malcolm “would talk often about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey’s paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey’s concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people.”

In Boston, Malcolm worked for William Paul Lennon, the son of a successful Rhode Island merchant. In 1944, Malcolm was a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s house on Arlington Street, near the Public Garden. In the autobiography, he writes about his friend Rudy, who went to see the “blueblood” every week: “He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.” Marable writes that, “based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon.” When this suggestion first surfaced, in a tendentious 1991 biography by Bruce Perry, the criticism was huge, but Marable insists that the evidence is now more compelling.

The days of Detroit Red came to an end in 1946. Malcolm and another hustler named Shorty Jarvis, along with their two white girlfriends, went on a robbery spree, and Malcolm was arrested trying to get a stolen watch repaired. After the judge gave him and Jarvis concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, Malcolm’s lawyer told him, “You had no business with white girls!”

At Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm boasted about his criminal exploits, got high on nutmeg, and met a jailhouse autodidact who convinced him of the virtues of books. Malcolm started reading Kant and Nietzsche, H. G. Wells and Herodotus; he even tried to memorize the dictionary. In 1948, he received a letter from his older brother Philbert saying that he and others in the family had converted to the Nation of Islam — “a program designed to help black people.” After reading up on the Nation, Malcolm sat in his cell and wrote twenty-five drafts of a one-page letter to Elijah Muhammad, pledging his spiritual loyalty. In a welcoming reply, Elijah Muhammad enclosed a five-dollar bill.

If you are a believer (and very few are these days), the origins of the Nation of Islam stretch back thousands of years, to a time when blacks, the “original people,” were assaulted by a mutant white race created by an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub. The whites achieved dominion over the earth and blacks “went to sleep,” mentally and spiritually. The purpose of the Nation of Islam was to rouse the black man from his slumber. (Armed spaceships come into it, too.) Such were the teachings of Wallace D. Fard, an ex-con, silk salesman, and eccentric storefront preacher who turned up in a Detroit ghetto around 1930. Fard also had more earthly advice. He told his followers to avoid alcohol, to work hard and save money, to own their own businesses, and to regain a sense of the nobility of their race. His Nation of Islam represented a cultish offshoot of a venerable American movement, black nationalism.

One summer night, in 1931, at a former Garveyite meeting hall in Detroit, a onetime sharecropper from Georgia with a fourth-grade education named Elijah Poole came to hear Fard preach, and afterward told him, “I know who you are, you are God himself.” “That’s right,” Fard said. “But don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.” Fard set up operations in Chicago, and Poole became his minister. In 1934, Fard mysteriously disappeared and the apostle, now called Elijah Muhammad, took command of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation that Malcolm joined when he was released, in 1952, was tiny and largely apolitical. Its members, who numbered in the hundreds, were instructed not to vote. Elijah Muhammad, who was remarkably uncharismatic, quickly recognized in Malcolm a dynamic and tireless organizer and speaker, and dispatched him to Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and, finally, Harlem, to establish new temples. While the civil-rights movement developed in the South, Malcolm went from ghetto to ghetto in the North, the Midwest, and California. He turned white supremacy on its head—whites were “blue-eyed devils”—and urged solidarity with the emerging independence movements of Africa and Asia. His early appeal was based less on the coherence of his political ideas than on the raw excitement of his presence at the lectern, the fierce clarity of his rhetoric, and (for all his verbal ferocity) a certain cool charm, even toward white reporters. For many poor, young, urban blacks, King was too middle-class and genteel, too Southern, too churchly and high-flown; Malcolm had lived as they had. “Nobody could handle Malcolm,” Louis Farrakhan, his protégé and eventual enemy, said. “I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm curse. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman. I never saw Malcolm eat in between meals. He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say his prayers. I never saw Malcolm late for an appointment. Malcolm was like a clock.” By 1961, according to Marable, the Nation had as many as seventy-five thousand members.

Even outsiders were impressed. Malcolm “is an excellent speaker, forceful and convincing,” one F.B.I. informant said, in 1958. “He is an expert organizer and an untiring worker,” whose hatred for whites “is not likely to erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that.”

Malcolm was not above appealing to the worst instincts of his followers. “Jews run the country,” he said. Women were “tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh.” As a way to mock the passive resisters of the mainstream civil-rights movement, he distinguished between the honest masses, the “field Negroes,” and the perfidious “house Negroes,” who were forever looking to their white masters for privilege and approval. (The political scientist Adolph Reed points out that the famous slave-revolt leaders — Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabriel Prosser—were house slaves.) Malcolm’s desire to rouse his followers and scandalize the white majority could lead him to disastrous miscalculations: in January, 1961, he met with representatives of the Klan, in Atlanta, confiding to his hooded interlocutors, “The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool.”

But the former numbers runner had an appetite for the high-stakes gamble. While King sought to enlist the sympathies of the white majority in order to achieve racial integration, Malcolm, the incendiary separatist, freely indulged his penchant for outrage. In June, 1962, a plane crashed in Paris carrying mostly well-to-do white passengers from Atlanta. In front of more than a thousand people in Los Angeles, Malcolm said that the disaster was “a very beautiful thing”: “We call on our God—he gets rid of a hundred and twenty of them.”

By 1959, fissures had emerged between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. Some of Elijah’s lieutenants resented Malcolm’s fame, his appearances with Mike Wallace and other television interviewers; others worried that Malcolm was angling to take over the Nation when Elijah died. But the tensions took on seamier aspects. In 1958, Malcolm married a woman named Betty Sanders, but by the following year the marriage (which is portrayed sentimentally in Lee’s film) was foundering. Malcolm sent a distressed letter to Elijah Muhammad:

The main source of our trouble was based on SEX … She placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing. … At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction. From then on, try as I may, I began to become very cool toward her … She later said she was going to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

Somehow, Elijah’s lieutenants learned about Malcolm’s problems, and did not hesitate to spread humiliating rumors.

Later that year, Malcolm heard that a young secretary at the Nation’s headquarters with whom he had had a romance before he married Betty was pregnant, and, he subsequently learned, with Elijah Muhammad’s child. Indeed, Elijah had impregnated other young women. When the woman asked Elijah for money, he was cruel and dismissive, saying, “You must think I’m a fool or Santa Claus.” When she called again, he told a minister who heard the exchange, “It looks like she will have to be put down.” By the early sixties, Malcolm had confronted Elijah about his sexual behavior, further offending the leadership of the Nation.

Finally, the relationship between Malcolm and his mentor exploded. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm defied the Nation’s instructions to stay quiet and said that the murder in Dallas represented “the chickens coming home to roost.” He added, “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They’ve always made me glad.” Elijah Muhammad “silenced” Malcolm X. Officially, the punishment was supposed to last just three months, but there seemed no chance of resolution. Malcolm was on his own. “I hadn’t hustled in the streets for years for nothing,” Malcolm told Haley. “I knew when I was being set up.”

In 1964, Malcolm decided to reform his soul, alter his politics, and refashion his public image. After touring Africa and the Middle East for two months, during which he made the hajj, he returned to Harlem an orthodox Muslim, a man in flux. His Garveyite belief in entrepreneurial capitalism shifted to socialism. He disavowed separatism. In a letter to a Times reporter, M. S. Handler, he wrote, “Some of my very dearest friends are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists — some are capitalists, socialists, conservatives, extremists . . . some are even Uncle Toms—some are black, brown, red, yellow and some are even white.”

Malcolm’s shift in the last year of his life, as dramatized in his autobiography, is what allowed middle-class blacks and white liberals to admire him. When Bill Clinton wore an “X” cap, he was not railing against blue-eyed devils; he was gesturing to this late, “humanistic” Malcolm. (He was also making a fashion statement.) Yet even in the final passage of his life Malcolm failed to build a serious political movement or create a coherent point of view. He had only a brief time left to him; everything was not resolved or reconciled. He was still full of contradictions, praising King one day, ridiculing him the next, hailing Elijah Muhammad before one audience, then denouncing him before another. He still could not accept nonviolent revolution. Three days before his death, Malcolm said, “I’m man enough to tell you that I can’t put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now.”

Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley. By joining Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright in the act of literary testimony, Malcolm became part of the most essential genre of African-American literature. With its depiction of racism and struggle, with its search for purpose, identity, community, and a name, Malcolm’s autobiography followed a familiar pattern—what the scholar Robert B. Stepto calls the “narrative of ascent.” “Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities,” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote. “They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life.”

But what do Malcolm’s readers see in him? Writing two decades ago, Cornel West called Malcolm “the skeleton in the closet lodged in the racial memory of most black professionals.” Consider the foremost black professional in the country—the President of the United States. After Barack Obama was inaugurated, he returned to the British government a bust of Winston Churchill that was on display in the Oval Office and installed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is rightly regarded as the singular hero of the era that lasted from the Montgomery bus boycott, in 1955, to his death, in April, 1968. Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.

Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In balmy Hawaii, at the most prestigious private school west of the Rockies, Obama found something in the narrative of a man who was also of mixed race, had lost his father, and needed to create a self. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me,” Obama wrote of Malcolm in “Dreams from My Father.” “The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.” Obama, who adored his white mother and grandparents, was disturbed by Malcolm’s desire to “expunge” the white blood in him. What he admired was the book’s depiction of Malcolm’s redemptive journey and his redemptive, universalist final year.

“I was never taken with some of his theorizing,” Obama told me last year. “I think that what Malcolm X did, though, was to tap into a long-running tradition within the African-American community, which is that, at certain moments, it’s important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. . . . That affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something, I think was important. And I think Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody.”

Obama dealt with black nationalists on Chicago’s South Side both as an organizer and as a state senator. Louis Farrakhan’s headquarters were within his district. When he first got to Chicago, he heard the nationalists on the radio and read their publication The Final Call. He came to see that their message had “twin strands,” one that was an affirmation of pride and self-reliance and one that depended on hatred, a form of “magical thinking” that deluded those who “could least afford such make-believe.” Of course, the complexities of that world reflect Malcolm X’s own complexities, his contradictions and resentments and hopes.

The narrative that Alex Haley crafted is, in certain respects, profoundly comforting: it transforms those twin strands into a distinct before and after. Here was a Malcolm who could still embody the legitimate rage of a humiliated people but also become part of the very cultural firmament he anathematized—a Malcolm who could, and did, end up on a postage stamp. Although Manning Marable may not have succeeded in writing a definitive work, his considerable scholarship does remind us how much is elided by any tale of a pilgrim’s progress. If the autobiography simplified reality, however, it kept faith with its subject’s ambitions. By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm assured himself a lasting place in American culture. It was his most brilliant wager.

reprinted from New Yorker magazine, 25 April 2011, page 74

Ralph’s Super Nazimarket

My formal complaint prompted the manager of the local Ralph’s to call me. He said that he had spoken to legal and they would prefer that I don't shop there and if I do I will be thrown out. I am absolutely AMAZED that he would start the conversation with, “I’m right and you’re wrong and NO SOUP FOR YOU.” I asked if I would be receiving something from their legal department and he said yes. I am amazed that he would tell me not to shop at Ralph’s. I said, “I don't see how you can refuse to let me shop there.” And he said, “They could and I would be THROWN OUT. He also said that they will not recycle and that I should recycle at Food4Less.” Then he wished me a nice day and hung up the phone.

UNBELIEVABLE. I will NEVER shop at Ralph's again or Food4Less which are both owned by Kroger.

What happened to my legal rights and my civil rights??? So that’s what I get from writing the corporate office. I am okay with that – I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that wouldn’t have me as a member. To my friends and fellow travelers – Ralph’s Supermarket treats some (and you know one) customers without any respect or dignity. Ralph’s Supermarket does not freely accept recycle bottle and cans. Ralph’s Supermarket would rather that you shop at their competitor because they don’t believe that the customer is at the core of their business. Ralph’s Supermarket is a bully. Ralph’s Supermarket is a Nazimarket.

DO NOT SHOP at Ralph’s Supermarket.

Someone owes me $1.63

I really appreciate the advice a FB friend gave me which was to return my empty bottles and cans to the Recycle Center located in National City. I took my empties to the 30th Street location and found it clean and well organized. The signage was easy to understand and instructed me to separate plastic, cans and bottles into separate bins. When I selected a bin to start with a homeless man (or so I suspected) politely in barely a whisper said to be careful with that bin as it had hidden sharp edges which could easily cut my hand. It took me a full second to appreciate and reflect on what was a truly humane moment, that this “experienced” urban scavenger would look out for a newbie like me. I was humbled by his humanity and concern.

I counted out 109 bottles and cans. Calculated at $.05 per item would equal $5.45 refund at the supermarket. But recycling centers calculate the refund based on weight. The refund rate on plastic was $.93/pound. The weight of my plastic was 1.8 pounds which totaled a $1.67 refund. The refund rate on aluminum was $1.54/pound. The weight of my cans was 1.2 pounds which totaled a $1.85 refund. I had six glass bottles which were counted out and totaled $.30 refund. My total refund $3.82

So I did the responsible thing: collected and cleaned all of my empty bottles and cans. Hauled them to a recycling center, and efficiently separated them into bins to be weighed, which resulted in a LOSS of $1.63 against what I had paid $.05 on each bottle and can. I’m not sure that going Green makes sense to me. I tried to return my empties to the supermarket where I purchased the items, only to be humiliated and treated as a problem rather than part of the environmental solution. I tired to return my empties to a recycling center and found myself shorted on my original expense. Either method seems to undermine the spirit and intent of recycling.

There has to be a better solution.

Ralph's Supermarket is VERY mean @ San Diego

So, I brought the Ralph's memo supporting bottle redemption with me when I went to Ralph's to return three bags of soda cans and bottles. The cashier refused, then the manager came over and said they don't do that and I would have to go to Food4Less. I showed him the memo from the other manager saying they have to do it, dated March 27th. He was condescending and big and scary and all my anxiety came out. I told him I've been through this before and to please not make me go through it again. I said the last time I had to use my cellphone to videotape them to get them to do it. He refused, stating that I could go to food town and that because there was a recycling center within a mile of the store he did not have to do it.

I told him to call the police, because I wasn't moving and I had already unpacked 60 cans. He said he would do it this once, but never again. The cashier told me she didn't know how to do it and all the cashiers looked at me like I was a homeless person or the devil.

After I stood there about 10 minutes I called out to one of the cashiers who had scanned my empties the last time and asked if they were all just going to ignore me. All the cashiers said the manager said they didn't have to do it. I can't blame them since managers are known to fire workers on the spot in San Diego. She called the manager again and he came back and said they would do it this one time and that next time he would have signage stating they didn't have to recycle and that he would give me literature stating they didn't have to recycle. I told him it was the recycling law that any place that sells cans had to take them. But I was really upset by then, it was all I could do not to cry. He again told me that since Food4Less is a recycling center Ralph's doesn't have to take empty cans or bottles. I told him I didn't shop at Food4Less, but I did shop at Ralphs.

Very upsetting.

I don't think I can emotionally go through it again. I received $10.55 (it should have been $10.60 but I wasn't going to fight them over a nickel given the state I was in). Then I went to the shoe repair shop and picked up my shoe that the dog had ripped last week (the sandles that I live in) and paid the man $9.50 for the repair.

What a day.