Nazi Nightmares

One of the first big bads I ever experienced was Nazis. We weren’t allowed to watch sex in tv and movies, but violence was allowed, and I saw plenty of WWII content. Then, in 4th grade, I overheard my mom tell my older sister about the antichrist before bed one night¹. Suddenly, I was regularly having vivid dreams of antichrist Nazis storming our house where we hid in vain. This continued for years. In adolescence, these dreams morphed into kidnappers and sexual predators. Either way, I often had dreams where I knew I was in danger, attempted to hide somewhere that I normally found safe, and was inevitably found by the person causing that danger.

Yesterday on Instagram Live, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez described the events of the January 6th insurrection as she experienced them. She was made aware of the danger to herself. She made decisions to help keep herself safe. She had a moment where she needed to hide and feared that Nazis had come to hurt/kill her.

It was literally the stuff of nightmares. My nightmares.

I feel really unsettled. There are a lot of general reasons, like the fact that our nation’s capitol seems extremely vulnerable to white supremacists, and that the breech to the building seems to have been allowed to happen. There’s the fact that Republicans have stayed their course of denying the legitimacy of the election and downplaying the seriousness of the danger to their colleagues.

I also feel personally agitated. This didn’t even happen to me, but hearing my childhood nightmare played out to a real person makes me queasy.

A lot of people are opposed to calling these predominantly white, male protestors Nazis. I won’t reshare any of the images, but there is ample documentation of the hoard wearing pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic paraphernalia. In addition to that, they are trading in fear. They are afraid of losing power to women, queer people, and racial minorities. They are afraid that what they and their ancestors have done for centuries will be done to them when they are out of power. And they want anyone who opposes their dogmatic, narrow understanding of who should be self-determining to be afraid also. The Nazis of WWII traded in fear, so much so that they haunted my childhood nightmares, 50 years after their reign ended.

The Neo Nazis of today are trading in fear.

And I am afraid.

I am afraid for the future of democracy here. I am afraid that more people will get hurt or lose their lives². I am afraid that the slow corrosive chipping away at historical progress will lead us into the dark ages, while people fighting for new progress will fail, even amid occasional wins. I am afraid that Democrats won’t pass strong legislation, then lose control of Congress in 2022 and our chances of transformation will become nil. I am afraid, because I am a woman and there’s a long history of violence against women being ignored. I am afraid for my Black and brown friends and neighbors, because there is a long history of violence and systemic oppression against them being downplayed and ignored. I am afraid that our democracy works better for Nazis and crooks than it does for working people.

I want to say I am hopeful. There are things to be hopeful about. We have 2 years to reverse course, do some healing, and create meaningful limits on cravenness and corruption in our federal government. More people who think like me are running for office at every level and winning. Those are facts, but not how I feel.

We will not heal and move forward through executive order or through papering over the pain and fear. That’s not how it works. The people who tried to overthrow our democracy, including elected Members of Congress need consequences. They are a cancer, and we don’t negotiate with cancer. We cannot be a healthy democracy as long as they and their ilk hold office and are willing to deploy violence and the fear of violence to get their way.

I was helpless in my dreams, paralyzed with fear, fear that stayed with me even in waking hours. But that’s a lie. Awake, I can take action. Awake, I am in charge, not just a witness to my own fate. The demise of our democracy is not inevitable. We can be democracy together. We must be democracy together.

_{1 Note to parents: whatever scary things you believe in, whether antichrists or climate change, don’t tell your kids about them right before bed.}

^{2 This fear is really just the reality since we are going on one year of a pandemic that was largely preventable. See also medical apartheid and environmental racism.}

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What’s Wrong with AOC’s Vanity Fair Cover? It’s Not What You Think

US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on the cover of Vanity Fair. She’s become a progressive and fashion icon, and VF’s choice to feature her is in keeping with other politically bent covers (see Breonna Taylor) this year.

As a rule, she puts a lot of care into her appearance, and it shows. Something that has struck me about The Squad in general is that they all dress well, especially Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and AOC. As a feminist who loves clothes, it’s exciting to me to see legislators looking so good. I have often dreamed of running for office and bringing my sense of style with me–something these women are doing and doing well. Women in politics often read as frumpy, even when polished, communicating that clothing is secondary to their jobs as civil servants. The Squad takes the angle that their clothes are integral to their roles as legislators.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been the subject of scrutiny because of her clothes. Her Republican colleagues have been quick to comment on her clothing, calling into question her position as a member of the working class or conversely her role as a congresswoman. Before AOC became a legislator, she was a bartender and probably only dreamed of wearing the kind of designer clothes she sports in the Vanity Fair spread. Once again, though, conservative pundits have been quick to call into question her socialist bona fides after an accounting of the retail price of her outfits came out.

Here’s the list of what she wore and its retail price according to the Daily Mail:
$2,850 Loewe suit
$1,000 Aliette suit (approx)
$3,000 Carolina Herrera suit
$2,500 Christopher John Rogers suit
$815 Wales Bonner dress
$695 Christian Louboutin slingbacks
$1,450 Diamond, gold and floating pearl Mateo earrings
$2,000 Bulgari earrings (approx) 
TOTAL:  $14,310

Right-wingers are excited to condemn the AOC spread as anti-socialist because they police women’s bodies with enthusiasm, and they want to run a negative press campaign to discredit her. They are themselves hypocrites and need to accuse others of hypocrisy to distract from their own. But what if you’re a leftist (and you are committed to not policing women’s bodies or discrediting left-leaning politicians) and working person to whom $14,000 on a handful of clothes sounds utterly outrageous? Should you too be angry with AOC? Is this a slap in the face of socialism?

This is a lot of money–95% of the annual income of anyone working full time and making minimum wage. It would even be a big chunk of AOC’s annual salary at 8%. It is also money AOC didn’t spend. It’s not even clear whether Vanity Fair paid anything for these items. I am not sure what their procurement process was, but it’s more than likely that they didn’t pay for it either.

First, let’s understand a couple things about fashion. To start, pricing, especially designer pricing, is arbitrary to the nth degree. Yes, there are some basic material and labor costs, but individual fashion houses set their profit margin, which varies and is in no way reflective of the value of the materials or working conditions. Further, market price for comparable clothing is all over the map.

Second, when we are talking about designer clothing, $2-3k for a suit is normal. Gal Gadot wore a Givenchy suit in Vantiy Fair this month, and those easily retail at $3.5K. In March, Ana De Armas was photographed in Valentino for Vanity Fair. Their dresses range from $2300 to $7900.

There’s a lot to say about high-end fashion being ridiculously priced these days. There have been some excellent critiques on pricing scales, noting that as wages have stagnated, designer clothing has increased in price, becoming less and less accessible, all while designers are also putting out ready-to-wear lines at lower price points to compensate for their flagging runway sales. Meanwhile, the rise of fast fashion is breaking down class barriers, which is a poor payoff for the environmental devastation it’s causing.

What does this mean for Representative AOC’s socialist status? First, she is a democratic socialist. This means she wants to limit capitalism, not necessarily destroy it (which isn’t pure socialism). She wants to limit it a lot, though, and she’s further left than just about anyone else in congress. That’s good! If you’re a leftist, that means she wants to pass legislation that will move your leftist agenda forward. A $2.8k suit gifted by a fashion magazine isn’t going to prevent her from doing that. Her goal isn’t to make congress poorer (at least not in their base salary), but to elevate everyone else. She hasn’t achieved that goal yet.

Another angle to this is fashion as art. I don’t think it’s difficult to argue that the folks at Vanity Fair are creating art or, at least, curating it. Clothing is at the intersection of time, geography, class, culture, gender, and personal psychology. It is layered with artistic talent and in conversation with other works and society. AOC as art makes $14K seem more reasonable. We know what socialism has to say about fashion as function here. It’s easy to recognize the classism fundamental to the fashion industry’s framework. What does socialism have to say about fashion as art? In one sense, a $15 magazine filled with high fashion is highly accessible art, democratized. You don’t even need to buy the magazine to see the images shot by Tyler Mitchell. We might not be wearing the clothes, but maybe they are meant to be seen and not worn. What does public art mean for clothing? I don’t know entirely. I don’t want to get rid of high-end fashion, even as a leftist, because I think it is art. I don’t think equality means very much if we don’t also make the world beautiful.

All of that said, I think this may have been a misstep. This spread doesn’t give rise to a stirring rendition of “Solidarity Forever,” despite the white suit AOC wears on the cover, referencing Suffragette fashion of yesteryear. Unfortunately, the price point is inconsistent with her image of connecting to the people. Most of us will never even touch clothes this expensive. It’s what we hate about Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer: being out of touch.

AOC is not wealthy compared to her fellow congresspeople. She is wealthy compared to the American people, and that scale matters. Trump cheated on his taxes. Pelosi orders expensive ice cream by the freezer-full. AOC now has been gifted a designer suit.

In contrast, this last week, Ilhan Omar was featured on the cover of Teen Vogue with her daughter Isri. Both of them opted to wear items from their own wardrobe. Omar looked regal without labels. I think this is a move AOC could have made as well.

Another option would have been to select from designers working on transparency in supply chain, paying a living wage at every stage of the garment production process, ensuring safe working environments, and moving toward carbon neutral production. A $2800 suit seems less alarming with that kind of dedication to improving some of fashion’s worst features, even if the price point is still unattainable for most of us. She also could have exclusively worn American or Latinx designers. This indulgence ultimately feels like a lost opportunity.

Fashion has long been used to delineate class. From sumptuary laws to conspicuous consumption, there is a lot of status baked into clothing. Ocasio-Cortez has taken a huge leap up into the governing class, and this spread shows that. She’s unquestionably a sitting U.S. Congressperson and no longer a bartender.

Ultimately, if you are a leftist, I think thoughtful critique of the spread in Vanity Fair is warranted, which is different from shaming her for wearing nice clothes or accepting an expensive gift. AOC is as far left as congress gets. To maintain her image as a congressperson of the people, she needs to make choices in her dress, even editorialized items she doesn’t own, that reflect that.

This Morning, I Saw a Man Get Tased

(CW: police violence)

This morning, I saw a man get tased.

I saw a Black man get tased.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police department for shoplifting groceries.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic, during which the government has only provided $1,200 in 6 months.

I saw a Black man wearing red get tased by the Minneapolis Police Department for shoplifting groceries during a global pandemic, during which the government has only provided $1,200 in 6 months, which amounts to less than $7 per day.

This happened next door to my 3-month-old son’s daycare.
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I am one block away, I see a Black man get up from sitting on the curb, surrounded by police. He pulls away. I hear a pop. He crumples. Then 5 or 6 officers are on him, cuffing him. Kneeling and pressing on limbs, putting him on a gurney, strapping him down, pressing his head down. I don’t hear him make a sound. I see the wires from the taser. I know the pop was too quiet to be a gunshot, but the visual is jarringly similar.

I only film a minute of it, after the tasing, after he is already on the gurney. Because I don’t press record correctly in my hurry to get my phone out.

I hold my son in my arms while I film. I say we live in a police state to him. I say we need other people, not police to respond when someone is having a mental health crisis. When someone is unarmed and has committed a nonviolent crime. When someone is trying to feed themselves.

I count the squad cars. It takes me too long, because I am shaking. I stop at 5. Pause. There are 6.

They put him in an ambulance. I stop filming. I put my son in his stroller. He cries. I say, now we will pray.  I wish I knew the man’s name. I walk to the grocery store.

The employees are talking about the man. He pretends to be crazy they say, to get away with it. He got tased they say in grimly satisfied tones. The white store managers had been standing at the end of the block where he got tased. When I leave the store, they are standing by the entrance, talking to another white store manager.

No one making decisions about any of this is Black. This man probably had white teachers in school. And now, when he’s trying to figure out how to feed himself, it’s white store managers and white cops. And his community can’t build social, political, or economic power, such that, when he’s out of food, someone sees him and sees his humanity, and says, what do you need to be able to eat with dignity?

I find somewhere to sit and nurse my son before daycare, across from an apartment building. Several tenants go in and out while he eats. They are all Black. Why aren’t the store managers Black? Do they live within a block of the store? A mile? Two miles? I don’t think so.

My son is done eating. I walk us back to the daycare. All the squad cars are gone. On the stoop, there are two packages of fish from the grocery store. They tased a man and didn’t return the stolen goods to the store. They left them to spoil in the sun.

In this police state, nobody wins.

I drop my son off at daycare. I walk home. I see the man wearing red seize and crumple over and over in my mind. I cry. Seize. Crumple. Cry. Seize. Crumple. Cry.

My rage starts to boil. We’re lucky it’s only protests and looting.
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A few weeks ago, my city council member, Lisa Goodman, sent out a newsletter saying that people feel unsafe downtown, condemning the looting that occurred after a man’s public suicide was mistaken for another police killing, and not condemning the MPD for eroding trust to the point that it was reasonable to believe they had shot and killed another Black man.

The only violence I saw today was perpetrated by the police. One of the only times I feel unsafe downtown is when I see the police interacting with citizens. I don’t like all my neighbors. Some of them are rude and stinky and sexist. Some of them walk three-wide on the sidewalk and don’t make room for anyone else. It’s annoying, but not unsafe.

Cars that don’t yield for pedestrians are unsafe. Cyclists and scooterists who use the sidewalk are unsafe. Police are unsafe.
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A friend encouraged me to write down how I imagine this should have gone differently. So here are my what ifs:

What if the store manager had a conversation with the man and said, ”I know it’s tough. I know you need food. How can I help you get the food you need and not steal it?”

What if the city had unarmed civil servants and social workers who could be called, instead of armed police, who would connect this man with services to get his needs met?

What if the store managers were Black and lived in the community, so that they recognized that they were investing in the whole community, not just paying customers?

What if food was a public good and decommodified?

What if this was a production of Les Miserables? What if this man was Jean Valjean?

What if society took its metaphorical and physical boot off of the necks of Black people?

Employment Gaps

Employers are not allowed to ask prospective employees an entire myriad of questions in interviews. This includes asking you for your race, religion, genetic information, pregnancy status, marital status or whether you have children. In at will states, employers also cannot ask candidates for a term of commitment (aka–“Are you willing to be in this role for at least two years?”–an absurd question, because, even if you answer in the affirmative, they are under no obligation to employ you for at least two years).

If you get asked these questions in a interview, politely inform the interviewer that such a question is illegal. I am not speaking out of experience, because the only time this has happened to me, I didn’t know I was being asked an illegal question. Ideally, employers don’t ask these questions, but being prepared for if they do is a good idea, especially if you are not white, straight, cis, male, and able bodied. If you have experience calling out illegal questions in an interview, I want to hear about it!

Employers can ask you to explain employment gaps. That means if you were out of work for 6 months or more to care for a child or due to a chronic health issue or other disability, you are asked to disclose that either in an interview or on an application–before you even get in the room.

Should employers be allowed to require you to explain employment gaps? Is it any of their business?

I think the answer is no. Just like the sound of high-heels on the wood floor when orchestras started doing blind auditions, questions about employment gaps surreptitiously disadvantage groups that are already disadvantaged. Mothers (who take a disproportionate amount of time off to raise children) the disabled, and people who have been in prison suffer the most from these questions. So, people who already have a harder time finding and keeping work are being asked in a round-about fashion whether they are par. This does not lead to a fair hiring process, but a deeply biased one.

I know that whether someone has been in prison sounds like it may be of some interest to an employer, and in many states employers can ask about it as early as a job application. This is its own issue, and I know that I cannot fully do it justice here. The long and short of it is that, with rare exception, someone’s completed sentence ought not determine whether they are fit for a job.

Requiring applicants to explain gaps in employment on a job application immediately signals to me that your company is not aware of how various groups are discriminated against in the workplace or are not willing to be part of making a difference.

This practice has proven to be prevalent in my current job search, making me nervous for my future, should I ever develop a disability or take time off to be a parent (I don’t currently think prison is on the table).

Croissants are a Sham and Other Things I Believe Without Evidence

When I moved to France for a year, I had a splendid going away party, for which I attempted to order a large number of croissants from a local bakery. The baker was lovely, but he said he didn’t make croissants in his bakery, because they are hard; they require a lot of time and energy, and don’t always come out very well. Since he was not going to make his own, he didn’t want to sell them. He said the bakeries in the area that did serve croissants almost all purchased their dough from a single source and passed it off as their own–in other words, I’d do just as well buying grocery store croissants as going to any bakery in the area. An industrial bakery was making pretty good (or, at least, extremely consistent) puff pastry, selling it to smaller bakeries, and we all got to eat pretty good croissants as a result.

A photo of me at my Bon Voyage. Croissants not pictured. I believe they came from our local Rainbow, RIP.

I can’t say I have a reason to disbelieve this information, but it was passed off to me twelve years ago (and memory is finicky), and I have not done any research whatsoever to verify this claim. However, every time I have a sub-par croissant in the Twin Cities, I say to myself, “They must make their own dough.” Also, every time I have a perfect, to a T, honest to goodness, French croissant in the Twin Cities (I have only ever had one at Patisserie 46), I say to myself, “They must make their own dough.”

I sometimes make similar assumptions based on the quality of croissants in other cities, guessing that the croissant racket it more or less the same throughout the country.

I did defer to an expert on this subject for the purpose of this post, and a former Patisserie 46 employee says that they do make their own croissant dough, further enforcing my bias.

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In preparation for my honeymoon, I messaged my host families that I would be visiting, and they asked me what food I wanted to eat. I told them I wanted Belcastel bread, Marcillac wine, and Aligot.

I have a very clear idea of this bread. It comes from a gigantic, round loaf, maybe 2 feet in diameter. I remember my host dad, Pascal, sending me into a bakery to order it on more than one occasion–instructing me on how to order just a section of it, instead of the entire, giant loaf. The crust is so dark, it is nearly black, and thick; thicker than any crust you’d see in the United States. The middle is spongy and nutty in scent and flavor. I imagined its size was due the medieval practice of villages having one communal oven. If you have to share the oven, why not just make one loaf and share it?

The bread Belcastel does not exist. There may be such a bread, as I have described, but it is not called Belcastel. There is no bread, nor any other food (not even wine), in France (or anywhere else) called Belcastel. There is a town by that name, in France, near where I lived.

Memory is finicky.

It appears I may have to abandon my belief that my favorite French bread is called Belcastel. Then again, the bread my host sister found, while similar, was not two feet in diameter and didn’t taste as good as I had remembered. So maybe my favorite French bread is but a memory, and I can accurately say, that Belcastel is still my favorite.

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At summer camp, a counselor once said that mosquitoes are attracted to people who eat bananas more than people who don’t. Friends, I no longer eat bananas. Also, I don’t like bananas, but like, what if she was right? I’m really avoiding two evils, the taste and texture of bananas and mosquito bites. If I do eat a banana, I eat it only when the last mosquito of the summer is dead, and the first mosquito of spring has yet to hatch.

This is convenient-to-believe pseudo-science, rather than something I wholeheartedly believe, but that doesn’t prevent me from acting on it and, occasionally, sharing it with others, despite doing so with caveats, like this.

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We make assumptions and believe things all the time with little to no evidence. While the word of the baker (someone who is probably an authority on the industry he works in) can be presumed to be reasonably correct, my memory of it, or even initial understanding, may be flawed to the point of misrepresenting it to myself and others over the course of more than a decade now. How many people have I told that Belcastel is my favorite French bread? Dozens. While I now understand why, even 12 years ago, my host brother Julien gave me a quizzical look when I told him that was the best bread, I never investigated further at the time. I told myself that I had pronounced it wrong or that it was not very common, but never-ever had I imagined that I simply got the name wrong. Had I never returned to France, I could have gone on wrongly telling everyone about a bread that didn’t exist.

These are inconsequential examples, amusing, even. At worst, they misattribute the work of a few dedicated bakers in the Twin Cities Metro Area, deprive me of a source of potassium, and make me look silly in front of my friends. There are a lot of other things we believe, spread, and act on that are of greater consequence. They might malign entire continents, races, genders, etc. They lead to job discrimination, alienation, and even cruelty from others.

I was able to challenge my belief about Belcastel, because I talked to some of the only people on the planet who would know for sure, a few people in France who live near the town of Belcastel. It’s a lot easier to tell if your socio-political convictions are true–things that are measured regularly, to a great depth. Use google. Read broadly. Meet new people. Ask yourself “does this opinion hurt someone in power or someone disenfranchised?” The answer will tell you a lot about how true it is as well as how harmful or harmless it could be.

Also, eat your bananas.

Scarves, Mittens, Hats

One memory of my childhood that has resurfaced as I reacquaint myself with Minnesota winters is of a bin full of winter wears. This contained any winter accessory you could desire–scarves, mittens, hats, gloves, neck warmers, even thick socks. When it was time to bundle up for a romp in the snow, we raided the bin. It was in this way that a single glove whose partner had long since disappeared could linger in our home for years, at the bottom of the bin, only to be used in desperation, when there were no matching gloves that fit. It was a way of holding onto memories, in a way. Plunge your hands into the bottom of the bin and pull out the gloves you wore when someone ran into a fence with the toboggan and split his lip, or the hat from the winter your neighbor plowed the entire neighborhood and dumped all the extra snow in massive piles in the empty lot.

I have been amassing winter clothes. It is cold as tits here–a bad simile, but fun to say. It snowed hard in October and then it felt like a complete month where the temperature never broke 30, and dipped into the low teens. And I know it gets even worse in January. My nose has been mildly bleeding for 6 weeks, because it’s so dry; and my phone battery is shot, because it was not designed for use in these temperatures.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a coat and snow pants for skiing. Also, so I can once again rollick in the snow. I finally have proper winter boots. I had been muddling through with thick socks–which is a pretty good way to do it.

I have to think about ice almost every time I set foot outside. I have not fallen yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Right now, I have no organizing principle around my growing pile of heavy scarves, hats, and gloves, so they are just kind of overflowing in the front closet or the desk chair, where I plop things I don’t have a plan for.

I don’t like holding on to things. I have few tchotchkes. My best possessions are my clothes, books, and, more recently, my sewing machines. Those are what I care about, and those are what take up the most space.

I need a bin though. A tub where all things winter can live for easy access in the cold months, that can be tidily put away when it warms up again. I need a spot where partnerless gloves can cling to me for too many years, and remind me of yesteryear, of the cold, of the magical, confounded snow.

My Chili

This isn’t a food blog.

BUT…

I think people get chili wrong often, and I think my chili is above average, and I’m going to share the secrets I learned from my mother that make it so good.

First some facts: if you’re from Texas, you will want to refer to this recipe as bean stew. I am not from Texas, so, to me, chili is any soup that is bean and tomato based and seasoned with chili powder. The meat is totally negotiable, which I fully understand is sacrilege to the Texans in my life. This particular recipe is vegetarian (vegan if you wish), but the secret ingredients are applicable to meat chili as well.

Second, some opinions: soups and stews are not exact sciences. It is ok to approximate, make substitutions, etc. I like following a recipe when I don’t know what I’m doing or for a technically challenging dish, but soups are usually easy for me to get a handle on, and I can manage proportions from memory and feel. This intuitive approach comes from cooking for most of my life and following a lot of recipes first. What I’m saying is, my approach to cooking is not for beginners, because I’m not breaking down the basics. If you basically know how to make chili already, do that and add my secret ingredients. I think you’ll like it better. As general soup wisdom goes, the longer it cooks, the better it tastes (with rare exception), and alcohol makes everything taste better. Wine, beer, vodka, rum, brandy. Take your pick.

Ok, if you aren’t just rolling your eyes about this interminable description and scrolling through to the recipe, here’s the deepest secret that nobody knows. Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud of the tree called life–well, at least, here’s the secret my mother taught me: use mustard, brown sugar, and chocolate (not enough chocolate for it to be considered mole–I’ve done that and I’m over it now). They all cut the acidity of the tomatoes and add layers to the flavor. The chocolate also deepens the color and creates a more stew-like texture. Plus, mustard and chocolate are binding agents, so your fat won’t separate.

Ah, at last. The recipe. What you came here for. What you skipped the description for.

Claire’s Chili

2 Tbs olive oil
1 medium-large onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 C (2-3) carrots, finely chopped
1-3 jalapenos, finely chopped (this directly impacts how spicy your chili is, so know your audience)
5 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 Tbs cumin
3-4 Tbs chili powder
salt and pepper to taste (beans are like black holes for salt, in my experience, and I always use more than I think I ought to)
1 cup barley
1 large can San Marzano tomatoes
2 – 15 oz cans kidney beans
2 – 15 oz cans black beans
1 1/2 cup vegetable stock
1-2 Tbs Dijon mustard
1-2 Tbs powdered or baking chocolate (I literally put a fancy truffle in my last pot, because it was the only chocolate I had on hand)
3 Tbs brown sugar
2 shots of tequila

(Top with grated cheese, sour cream, cilantro)

1. Heat olive oil in large pot at medium high heat. Add onion, carrot, jalapeno, and garlic. Saute.
2. Add cumin and chili powder, salt and pepper to taste.
3. Combine remaining ingredients. Break up tomatoes with a spatula. Bring to a boil while stirring regularly. Reduce heat and simmer for an hour or until the barley is fully cooked (a tender but still springy texture). The longer you cook it, the better it will taste, so keep simmering as time allows, and add more water or stock if needed.
4. Serve with cheese, sour cream, and cilantro as desired.
5. (you can do all of this in an instant pot as well, and set to pressure cook for 30 minutes. I have yet to do this so it doesn’t shut off because its thinks it’s burning, but you should try it and see. Maybe an extra cup or two of stock would help).
6. (If you want to use meat, simply add your pound or so of preferred meat after the veggies and before the spices. You’ll want to brown it for texture and flavor. You can skip the barley too).
7. Serves a goodly number of people, like probably 6-9.

Hipster Baby Names that are Also Cities in Minnesota

Finding that perfect name for your baby takes some effort. You take into consideration family names, fictional characters you’ve loved since childhood, even geography, religion, whichever names your friends haven’t used yet. And of course you have to consider what sounds good and expresses the unique relationship that created your bundle of joy. You are unique and so is your baby. You remember the days of too many Samanthas, Katies, and Jessicas in every class, when every 6th boy was named Josh, and you know we must forsake such practices so that your child knows from day one who they are.

Well, Minnesota has a solution for you. I give you the top Hipster Baby Names that are Also Cities in Minnesota, ranked:

1. Chaska
   She wants none of your shit today. She knows exactly who she is and what she wants, and she’s not afraid to tell you that carrots are gross and mommy looks tired.
2. Edina
   Sweetness incarnate. Everyone she ever meets will ask her where she’s from, and most won’t believe the answer.
3. Anoka
   Anoka knows how to get woke-a.
4. Afton
   Sweet summer child, wind, and wisp, Afton is a poet, a sensitive soul, who probably won’t publish anything but will spend their free time at local poetry workshops working on purple prose. Afton will use words like “stentorious” and “arbitrarily” incorrectly at the age of six.
5. Eagan
   This baby is definitely wearing a bespoke onesie by six months.
6. Blaine
   It’s almost Blake and almost Blaire but it isn’t quite either. Rest assured, your child will constantly smell like vanilla and the tears of the innocent.
7. Duluth
   Boy or Girl, Duluth will love jumping in a pile of leaves in the fall and reading books on economic theory by flashlight in the closet.
8. Albert Lea
   It’s almost a normal name, but those three extra letters are a real curveball, as will be your little slugger.
9. Eveleth
   Not your grandma’s first name. But it could be, and that’s the point.
10. Minneapolis
    Minne, for short, will have an ongoing complex about being named after a major city, but somebody’s got to break the ice. This complex will eventually lead to them going by their middle name or embracing Wicca.
11. Hinkley
    Hinkley will always have a sophisticated rustic charm, leading to the establishment of the American version of a British, dying aristocracy. Hinkley will skip the glory days and go straight to defending the antiquated ways of wealthy country folk who have been on the land for generations.
12. Hastings
    Typically a family name, young Hastings Phillips will often confuse his teachers as they attempt to call him Phil Hastings. Nonetheless, his name will always have a nice ring to it, dignified, said quickly, but never rushed.
13. Hibbing
    Hibbing was born a child of the earth, and never gets over wearing overalls.
14. Owatonna
    On second thought, Owatonna was an actual Sioux princess, so don’t name your child after her unless you are really, verifiably Sioux or someone who is Sioux has naming rights to your first born.
15. Minnetonka
    Minnetonka means “great water,” so expect to change more than the usual number of diapers.

Honorable mentions that are a) actually people names or b) should be people names:

1. Winona
2. Bethel
3. Mora
4. Bemidji
5. Cloquet
6. Chanhassen
7. Isanti
8. Saint Paul (pronounced: sin pl)
9. Zumbrota
10. Welch (pronounce with a hard ch)
11. Hopkins
12. Mankato
13. Mazeppa
14. Eyota
15. Walbo/Dalbo

Names that will make you child sound like a member of the British Aristocracy, but ironically. Every one of these kids has a pair of suspenders and no fewer than 4 tweed jackets by 12 months. You, as their parents, are obligated to end or begin your sentences with “my dear boy” when speaking to them, regardless of gender:

1. Rochester
2. Lanesboro
3. Ostrander
4. Brainerd
5. Bloomington
6. Woodbury
7. Hazelton
8. Winsted
9. Blakeley
10. Vermillion
11. Lewiston
12. Rushford
13. Andover
14. Brunswick
15. Monticello

 

Next week: A list of hipster baby names that are also lakes in Minnesota.

Eat The Rich

I’ve been saying this a lot lately and kind of hoping someone will get bothered or curious about it, but no one has, so I am going to gratuitously explain why I think it’s important that we all make “eat the rich” our own mantra.

First of all, why eat the rich? They don’t taste very good. They are usually past their prime and pumped full of preservatives and chemicals. Plus there’s the tangential concern that cannibalism is frowned upon in our society.

Being rich is immoral. I was convinced of this by A.Q. Smith’s article “It’s Basically Just Immoral to be Rich.” Many utilitarians have made similar arguments, most notably Paul Singer, a philosopher who promotes philanthropic giving to the extreme. Other supporters include Jesus, several Old Testament prophets, and quite a few theologians since then. The long and short of Smith’s argument is that it doesn’t matter how you got rich, the extreme amount of suffering and struggle caused by poverty gives rise to an ethical burden on the wealthy not to keep their wealth.

While this isn’t an unpopular opinion in the history of ethics, it’s an unpopular practice, especially under capitalism.

If you find yourself wealthy, give your money away, like most of it, anything more than, say, $70,000 per year. If merely gifting makes you uncomfortable, create jobs. Pay your employees better.

This last bit is a concession to resistant capitalists. Giving people cash is a pretty sure way they will get their needs met, but cash assistance is unpopular because we view poverty, not wealth, as morally reprehensible.

Let’s refocus though, because we were talking about eating rich people, not convincing them with moral philosophy to change their ways. There’s a carnal difference.

I want wealth to be suspect. I want the accrual of large sums of money to be so repulsive in our culture that rich people are afraid to be rich. I want them to be performatively philanthropic, because to be wealthy is worse than cannibalism.  

(If you are feeling defensive right now, it’s either because you are rich, or you wish you were rich, and you should feel ashamed of yourself and your perversion).

So eat the rich. While you may want to dismiss such a directive as hyperbolic, it is meant to erode our collective agreement that being rich is a moral good. It is not.

Eat Jeff Bezos. Eat Brett Kavanaugh. Eat Elon Musk.

Then, make policy changes. Make it easy to get food stamps, cash assistance, and housing assistance. Make it hard to be wealthy. Because our spending on social programs is peanuts compared to the massive amounts of capital accumulated by the wealthiest people in the world, wealth accrued while evading taxes, wealth accrued while employees subsist on government assistance, despite working full time, wealth accrued while benefiting from a system that supports white, straight, cis, able-bodied men, and actively excludes everyone else. Stop worrying that someone who gets a few thousand dollars per year in government benefits is gaming the system, and start worrying how someone making millions of dollars in a year is evading taxes. Impose steep inheritance taxes.

Our culture is so biased toward protecting wealth, that we are still just fighting for a living minimum wage, but there has been no discussion around a wage ratio. This would create a dependency between the lowest paid workers and highest paid workers. If a CEO wants to make a lot of money, their employees also need to make a lot of money.

I do want to make policy changes, but until then (and maybe even after), I will do my best to be performatively repulsed by the rich. I won’t keep my distrust private. If you’re rich, I think you are bad and deserve public censure until you prove otherwise.

Eat the rich. They are the leeches of our society.

Eat the rich. They are bad at sharing.

Eat the rich. They break laws and use their money to cover it up.

Eat the rich. They don’t put their money back into the economy, but you do.

Eat the rich. They live in gated communities.

Eat the rich. They voted for Trump.

Eat the rich. They are liars and thieves.  

Eat the rich. Eat the rich. Eat the rich.

When I was Homeless in Seattle

In 2013, I was homeless.

It was 5 months, August through December.

I was lucky, because I never had to sleep outside.

I put all my things in storage, and I slept on some friends’ couch or my then-boyfriend’s couch.

I had a small selection of clothes and I went everywhere with my laptop (borrowed from a friend who had an extra one).

I was working, but couldn’t afford a place by myself. Honestly, I still can’t.

The uncertainty, the stress of applying for food assistance, the strain on my friends’ lives who helped me, the daily anxiety, it was awful. Thinking back on it, I can’t imagine what I was thinking starting a relationship while I was in that situation. I didn’t tell my boyfriend I was on food assistance, but he knew I was homeless—even half joked once about how I was dating him for his money. All of this reminds me of how classist this particular boyfriend was and all the reasons why it’s really good things didn’t work out.

During this time, I also read an article on poverty by Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth. If you haven’t read either, I encourage you to do so.

My parents kept telling me to move back to Minnesota. My therapist and I agreed that I should keep trying as long as I was working. Moving back would have meant giving up at the time.

I almost moved to the eastside to rent a room from a friend of a friend. She wanted $500 per month (which today sounds like a dream). I was making about $1500 per month after taxes and I wanted to save up for a deposit on an actual apartment. I couldn’t afford a third of my monthly income for temporary housing. I could only afford $300 per month. She didn’t seem to understand and kept offering the room at $500, like I could somehow just be flexible. Also, I was off food assistance now, because if I worked a full 40 hours per week, my gross earnings put me $20 over the cutoff. So, I had to pay for food, a bus pass, my cell phone (still a dumb phone), my storage unit, student loan payments, and still have enough money in three months to put a deposit down on an apartment—three months was the length of my contract for the job I was working at the time.

Then help arrived: my cousin was moving from California to Seattle. His parents were financing him until he got on his feet, and they offered to rent a 2-bedroom apartment so that I could stop being homeless.

They covered most of my rent and utilities for 2 years. I floated my cousin $300 for rent when I was working (which was only sometimes).

By the time I moved out, I had a full-time job with benefits. While I still can’t afford Seattle rents, I can afford to live here with a roommate. But it took 2 years and a lot of money from my aunt and uncle. I lived somewhere nice with in-unit washer and dryer. I basically won the lottery.

It’s important to understand some things when you are talking about helping homeless people.

• Studies show that it takes an average of 20 years of practically nothing going wrong to get out of poverty (I’m white, and I’ve had help, so it probably won’t take quite that long for me).

 

• People need what I got—2 years of housing—but sometimes, most of the time, they need it from the state, because their family doesn’t have the kind of resources my aunt and uncle do. Being able not to worry where I was sleeping changed my life. I overcame the worst of my depression and anxiety. I kept my room clean—like for the first time in my life. I bounced back from injuries caused by an accident on a bus. These are things that people in ultra-tiny houses and temporary shelter don’t have space to do—literally or metaphorically. I’m not saying we need to give every homeless person in-unit washers and dryers, but our standard for getting people off the streets needs to be better than a roof and four walls. It needs to be better than a dormitory filled with strangers. People need breathing room. They need keys and doors with locks to keep their stuff safe—even shabby stuff. And they need enough security where they aren’t constantly worried that tonight is their last night indoors. That includes people suffering from mental illness and addiction.

Seattle, huge swaths of it, has forgotten this—and perhaps never bothered to know in the first place. They think it’s ok to dehumanize and demonize people on the streets. These are not lazy people. They are people who started out without a lot and got less and less, even as the people who started out with enough got more than they knew what to do with.

I continue to be in favor of the employee head tax that the city council just repealed. I am in favor of a state income tax and capital gains tax. There is no imaginable reason why we should have two of the richest people in the world living in King County while we have more homeless people than New York City (a city with 11x our population).

The way we treat our most vulnerable matters. It doesn’t matter if we protect big businesses. They have so much going for them, because they already have enough. We need to take care of the people who don’t have enough. Those people, you’ll find, will most often be people of color, neural a-typical, LGBTQIA+. They will be the people whose families have neglected them, whose generational wealth has been stymied over centuries of oppression, who don’t have affluent aunts and uncles. If we’re going to be a progressive city, we need to do this and do it right.