July 25, 2015

Being local vs. being rooted

The rise of the "buy local" phenomenon is understandable given the omnipresence of chain stores across the nation and corporate control over the economy. Normal people distrust mega-sized entities having so much influence over their everyday lives. Supporting a local business, even if they sell mass market products, or purchasing local products, even if it's at a chain store, allows ordinary people push back against wealthy and powerful outsiders who are trying to gobble up the local ecosystem.

At the same time, we shouldn't mistake being local to a community with being rooted in that community. Depending on where you are in the country, a majority of the "buy local" businesses may not have been around for even five years, and may not exist another five years into the future.

This is part of the broader pattern where businesses catering to trendy upper-middle-class tastes go through a much more rapid and volatile churning, as yesterday's stairmaster farm gives way to today's yoga studio, or as one shabby chic design store becomes too predictable and gets replaced by another, more refreshing shabby chic design store.

These locally owned and operated businesses do keep outside corporate influence at bay, but they do not provide local residents with a sense of belonging to a community. Feeling anchored within a place requires that place to be fairly stable itself. No one can feel secure within a house that becomes unglued from its foundation and keeps shifting all over the landscape.

Chain stores, too, may be here today, gone tomorrow — especially if they're chasing after those with large disposable incomes. In one of the main shopping centers where I grew up during adolescence, there used to be a Whole Foods that arrived sometime during the 2000s, but has since moved 20 to 30 minutes away to a wealthier suburb. I don't think it lasted even 10 years.

As for places that are rooted, some may be local and quirky — such as the few mom & pop grocery stores still left — but others may be nondescript chain stores that have been there forever.

If it's been in place long enough, even a bland generic chain store may serve as an anchor for local residents' experiences and memories, in effect making it a one-of-a-kind and distinctly local place. Particular experiences of particular groups of people have unfolded there across several generations. Only to an outsider would the place look and feel "just like any other chain of its kind," blind to the social history within and around the built environment.

The inability to recognize one's outsider ignorance of local history and conditions stems from autism, which runs high among people who like to gab about architecture, geography, space, place, etc. And of course the handful of longtime residents who whine about nearby rooted businesses most likely never fit into the community in the first place.

"Why can't the city council just knock down those ugly two-story brick apartment buildings next to that lame barber shop and that useless hardware store? It could literally be a mid-rise tower with luxury condos above a Starbucks and a Panera on the ground floor. Oh wait, I forgot — the tacky locals here can't conceptualize how epic a mixed-use space would be. I swear, I'm getting out of this dump and moving to Minneapolis!"

It's disturbing to think of how much influence over commercial and civic life is wielded by this coalition of tone-deaf autistic outsiders and bratty local misfits.

Cohesive communities where folks have deep roots are not so easily destabilized, as the intentional lack of dynamism encourages the local brats to leave and makes it unattractive — BORING — as a target for colonization by trendoid transplants. Likewise, you can easily spot which areas to avoid living in, where none of the shops have been in place for more than five to ten years, mirroring the flux-driven anonymity among the residents.

On the practical side, how can these patterns be used to try to cement an otherwise rootless area? Rootedness would have to be an intentional plan at first. Start with something as "simple" as passing municipal legislation about turnover rates for commercial real estate. "Simple," assuming the will is there to begin with.

That would also go a long ways toward solving the problem of high turnover among residential real estate, as only those residents who prefer stability will stay or move in.

Attacking residential turnover is hard to accomplish directly. People will rightfully chafe at having their residency being regulated so closely by the government, even if it is in the best interests of communal stability. Regulating businesses for the greater community's interests is far more palatable politically.

Moreover, businesses, churches, libraries, and the like can remain in place indefinitely into the future and serve as anchors across the generations. A particular person living in a particular home cannot do that. Those who were closed to them may remember their house as "the house where Mrs. Baumgartner used to live," but that doesn't spread out too far as second-hand or third-hand knowledge, and will not be understood by future generations who don't know who Mrs. Baumgartner was to begin with. But they all may have worshiped in the same church, spent summer days in the same pool, and eaten at the same mom & pop cafeteria across the street.

July 22, 2015

The Trump phenomenon

Finally, a populist candidate speaking truth to power. His campaign has only started to take off, so there will be plenty of interesting developments ahead. Here are a few observations so far.

There's always a worry with populist candidates that they'll back down or water things down once they're in office. Not with Trump, who is not a career politician. Being a winner to a politician means getting elected to the highest possible office for the longest possible time. Whether you do a terrible job or not doesn't matter.

Trump has little room left to climb on the status pyramid — why not shoot for leader of the free world? Well, what kind of status boost would it be to rule over an increasingly third-world shithole of a country? It would be an embarrassment. Trump's ego works in our favor, since he couldn't stand being known as the leader of a loser country, which is what we're going to wind up as if current trends continue. His megalomania wouldn't be satisfied until he made the nation something worth bragging about again.

Even if he ends up not winning the Presidency, his assault on PC bullshit of all types will have tremendous immediate results. It's like those classic experiments on conformity that Solomon Asch ran. You're asked which of two lines is longer, and one is very obviously longer than the other. However, before you get to answer, about a dozen other people give the wrong answer. Faced with the pressure of sticking out, a good portion of people (by no means all) will quietly go along with the wrong answer.

But when there's just one other person who speaks the truth before it's your turn, it completely shatters the conformity effect. You are guaranteed to give the right answer, ignoring all the other wrong answers and latching onto the single right answer. "Phew, so I'm not the only one who thinks everyone else here is nuts!"

Sure, there are a handful of people who will straight-talk like Trump in real life, but they don't have much of a megaphone and are not very numerous. They can shatter the conformity effect for a good deal of folks who they come into contact with, but not the entire society. And in case you haven't been paying attention, it's been a good 20 years (the culture wars of the '90s) since any major public figure made a point of declaring that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes.

The media and political establishment have no clue how to react, since Trump is pointing out a very clear and very public error that they've all made — all said that the shorter line was longer, and based policies off of that. They're used to everyone having drunk the kool-aid, and only arguing about, say, how much longer the actually-short line is.

Trump is not nitpicking within the range of the received error, he's pointing out that at the basic level, they've all got it backwards — that's the shorter line, dummy, not the longer one! What kinda moron can't see that? The establishment is either stupid, incompetent, blind, deceitful, lying, or something — how else can they explain failing such an easy question like illegal immigration or free trade deals?

What the whining classes take to be mudslinging and name-calling is just the opposite: it's revealing that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. They're used to a charge of "incompetent" meaning that the person bungled the job of flooding more immigrants into the country, or bungled the job of securing more power for corporations than for nations. The elites all have the same goals, and only name-call one another for not living up to their shared ideal.

Trump is interrupting the conversation to ask, point-blank, what the hell kinda ideal is that? — Mexican criminals pouring over the border, and manufacturing sent to China so we can buy a bunch of cheap junk? He isn't targeting a particular individual for failing to live up to an ideal that he shares with them. He's targeting the whole lot of them for sharing such a warped and twisted ideal in the first place!

Shifting the direction that society is headed in — what ideals it will pursue — is far more worrisome to the establishment than mere character assassination. Of course, they don't want to open up a whole debate about whether their ideals are worth holding or not, since hardly any ordinary citizens would take their side. They are left only with mud-slinging (something they do out of habit anyway), which only helps Trump out.

"Do you see? They know I'm right on the issues about where the country is headed, so they ignore that and try to attack my character instead. Cowards!"

Lastly, one common view is that the WASP-y founding stock here has grown too timid, bored, or brainwashed into liberalism that it will take someone on the periphery of white America to deliver us from the plague, a la Giuliani in New York during the '90s. No self-respecting Italian is gonna let some buncha darkie bums get in his way of cleaning up The City.

And yet ethnic / peripheral whites vote liberal. The Celto-Germanic mass of the population may be in a slumber, but they have a keen sense of how much has been lost from recent demographic changes. Italians, Poles, etc., may (or may not) be outraged at the influx of corrosive Mexicans, but that's more of a turf war over who makes a better group of immigrants. They aren't from the founding stock.

Trump is Scottish on his mother's side and Bavarian on his father's. His personality is certainly more on the Celtic side, and he's Presbyterian rather than Catholic. Hard to find a more mainline American candidate than that.

He's also born and raised in New York, where he has stayed into adulthood. That's way more than you can say for the rootedness of the likes of George W. Bush, a New England preppy who LARPs as a Texan, or John McCain, a DC-area native who took up his Wild West cosplay act in middle age. Yosemite Sam also chose his running-mate for cosplay points ("Alaska: The Final Frontier"), and all it did was prove to voters how flakey and shallow people are out West. Romney was born and raised in Michigan, but his heritage is Mormon — more weird Westerners.

I haven't voted since Nader in 2000 (volunteered during the campaign on campus, too), but now there's a far more likely populist candidate to get behind. I honestly never thought I'd be voting again until old age. Voting Trump in 2016 could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to kick the Establishment right in the balls, and end their chances of reproducing.