Divisionary Tactics

Not a typo.

Perhaps certain trends among environmentalists present opportunities for the kind of locally controlled, small business growth that conservatives hold up as the ideal in market structures. Witness the growth in "farm-to-table" restaurants and the locally grown "movement."

As they anxiously calculate the carbon footprint of their own existence, eco-centrists have returned to a consumption model that seeks to minimize emissions related to food distribution. The vegan in Chicago, for example, wonders how much diesel exhaust was spent so that he could have California tomatoes in his winter salad. He makes spending choices then based on how far his food has travelled before landing in his local market. In response, savvy restaurateurs and grocers have committed to buying as many local goods as possible, pledging to ensure, for instance, that none of their wares have travel more than 250 miles to market. Others have created the farm-to-table restaurant where the menu follows the seasons and all the produce you consume is field fresh, picked that morning from the garden out back. Such commitments limit food options (turnips, not asparagus, in November), but the consumers holding those commitments feel better about the options they do have.

Some of us may scoff at the notion of intentionally limiting options in order to shop more locally. Nonetheless, the people who do make those decisions constitute a market for -- guess who -- small businesses, namely local farmers and the retailers that carry their product. What short-sighted conservatives may dismiss as a piece with "whacko liberalism" has resulted in some fairly capitalistic market growth and entrepreneurialism, be it ever so small.

But let us not despise small beginnings. Why not press the logical extensions of farm-to-table thinking to give new energy, not only to localized agriculture, but also to localized industry?

My Dad works for a textile company in eastern North Carolina. Several years ago his company began to shift their product focus from yarns for clothing manufactures to specialty yarns for crafters. Since then, they've expanded their presence in all facets of the crafting market, moving beyond textile based crafts into stamping, scrap-booking, and now more deeply into stationary products. Not a poor-mouth story, in the least. Rather, a fine example of entrepreneurial manoeuvring.

The most relevant part of the story here, of course, is the impetus for the change. I remember a conversation with Dad around the time his company first began to look into stamping and scrap-booking as a good product shift. He remarked that the last maker of men's shirts in America had just moved their operations overseas.

Now, I'm no expert on the state of the American textile industry. Nor have studied all the circumstances that have contributed to its decline. But I'm pretty sure that the costs of doing business have had something to do with it (duh). And I'm equally sure that government regulations drive up the costs of doing business for everybody.

So then, while the Chicago vegan has created a market for local farmers, I'd guess that the preponderance of other products that he purchases -- clothing, appliances, housewares, etc. -- burn beau-coup oil tramping across the Pacific, through the desert and over the plains to end up in his neighborhood Target, World Market or Best Buy. Why not extend the farm-to-table mentality to encourage and develop more markets for (rank patriotism, alert) American-made products? After all, socks made in St. Louis leave a smaller footprint than socks made in Honduras (pun intended). A blender made in Detroit travels less than one made in China.

I realize that these matters are complex and that there's a combination of factors that drive industries overseas. However, recent trends among eco-centrists have offered new life to the local farmer based on concerns about the fossil fuels expended to get an ear of corn on my plate. Why not consider the same in regards to the shirt on my back? Without doubt, there's a strong case that government regulation hurts business. Could there be an argument then that government regulation consequently hurts the environment as well? What consequences would arise if it were shown that the ideal of government-regulated industry hurts the ideal of earth-friendly commerce?

A Meatier Pulp: Raymond Chandler

The fifth of his Philip Marlowe novels, The Little Sister (1949) highlights all that places Raymond Chandler among the masters of the crime thriller. Gangsters, starlets, dirty cops, a shady doctor, ice picks, blackmail, double-crosses, and a mousy receptionist from Manhattan, Kansas who just wants to find her beloved brother Orin. With those elements, Chandler crafts a story that shows the destructive mechanations of the corrupt human heart ultimately leading to destruction of the self. And he does it with style.

Chandler's prose is both elegant and witty, moving beyond the hard-boiled tough talk common to the genre and approaching a larger literary vocabulary. With only a few simple lines, he can sketch out a scene that reeks with life. Or he can wax poetic about the plight of big-city cops -- working stiffs ground down by the pressures of being everyone's enemy. His characters are complex and full of the inner contradictions that make us human. Marlowe's wise-cracks betray as much admiration as disdain for the cosmopolitan L.A. lyfestyle that gives him business. As a character, the detective has as many layers as that complicated social strata in which he lives -- a world littered with super-rich movie producers, down and out low life hoods, and jokers of all kinds who fight and scratch their toward the one even as they hurdle inevitably toward the other. Having seen the development of the Hollywood culture, Marlowe himself is soft enough help a desperate out-of-towner, naive enough to get duped into putting himself in a tough spot, and cynical enough to keep from getting completely taken. Nothing's simple nor sentmental about Chandler's style, nonetheless, it remains accessable and deeply human.

Pre-Millennial, Dispensational, Wild-at-Heart, Pulp: A Real Page-Turner

Black, Red, and White (each published in 2004) form the main arc of Ted Dekker's Circle series. Green (2009), completes the circle, enigmatically billed as both the beginning and the end of the series. As a spin-off, Dekker has also released The Lost Books series. Dekker boasts over 30 published novels since 2001, with five others currently in the works, along with seven graphic novels. Following the contemporary pop-publishing trend, Thomas Nelson has effectively established the Ted Dekker brand, creating its own base market through prolific promotion, the primary goal being, not to produce good stories, but to sell a mind-numbing number of books.

Dekker has caused an interesting problem for me as an English teacher. Out of 15 students in this year's 8th grade class, 13 were boys who, on the one hand, moaned and whined like babies when asked to read Treasure Island or The Scarlet Pimpernel. Yet, on the other hand, I constantly found myself calling them down for reading extracurricular material during class -- and not only comix or wrestling magazines (though that was the case once or twice), but fat, hard back books with no pictures. Imagine that. Kids who goof off in class by reading novels. What a problem to have.

As the year wound down, and I ran out of material to teach, I incorporated a little more "at-ease" time into the class hour. I used the time to walk around and chat with students informally, and as I did, I nosed in on little groups of 14 year old boys talking about who's read Black and who's read Thr3e and who was going to be the first to finish Green. I decided to use the beginning of my summer to acquaint myelf with this fellow who had fueled a voracious reading appetite in these young men, and who may have quite possibly prejudiced them against reading the classics of adventure fiction.

So, finding a $5.00 copy of Black, I entered the Circle. Thanks to the kidness of a friend, I continued through Red and White, at no monetary cost. If a loaner copy of Green comes my way any time soon, I may complete the series, but it's not something I'm clearing my calendar for.

Essentially, Dekker employs a gimicky premise to present a particular theological world view. He drives stock characters at a break-neck pace through more twists than the Fuji track on Pole Position. Stylistically, Dekker relies too heavily on the fragment and single-sentence paragraph for emphasis, and a proponderance of exclamation points attempt to sell true suspense as well as any used car salesman, with as much success. His vision is a composite of Scofield Reference Bible commentary, John Eldridge treacle, and Tent-Revival apocolypto, most of which I can stomach.

What I find difficult to hold down, though, is the image of Christ presented in the mix. It's an image that flows out of the Eldrigde material, namely the fretful love-sick Jesus. Dekker's picture of Christ is of an anxious and pathetically desperate teen-ager, lacking any real confidence that those who belong to him will actually come to him. Instead, he rings his hands and whines.

Despite his stylistic quirks and thinly veiled theological agenda, Dekker does actually generate a great deal of suspense, and his charqacters display virtue, courage, self-sacrifice, fidelity and faith. Both G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis wrote in defense of the "penny-dreadful," the pulp of their day, for exactly those reasons. Despite egregious literary failures, such pulp does help enforce a general vision of good versus evil and keeps the popular consciousness tuned in to the fight. So, even in the midst of a scathing review, I think I'd put Dekker in that class, a contemporary "penny-dreadful." And as such, I'll (try) to let this be last critical word on the topic.

Moreover, I'll also try to find ways to draw analogies between Dekker and the assigned reading that skillfully created the genres and archetypes that he and others plunder so freely. I love that I teach 13 eighth grade boys who love to read. I cringe that their reading appetite turns them away from the very fountainhead that made their preferred fare possible in the first place. Lewis did write in defense of the penny-dreadful, but he also wrote in defense of reading old books. Apperently, it takes both to feed a healthy imagination.

Draft

Dan Stokes thumbed the sweat from his beer glass as he waited for a man in a pinstripe suit. He sat alone at a corner table with a good view of the place, scanning the room while trying to appear as if he weren't. He wore a generic gray suit, deeply creased from hours of travel, and a wine-colored tie busy enough to hide food stains. Even his starched white shirt looked yellowed and muted in the hazy lounge. Tucked in an unlit corner of a crowed bar blanketed with smoke, Stokes was the least conspicuous face in the room, Nonetheless, he felt at this moment as open to general observation as if he'd been the only man standing at center court.