In Response to Mike Isaac's Story on Uber in the New York Times

More and more I think we would all be better off if we spent our days tending to our own little vegetable plots, having some soup, and then calling it a day.

The comment above drew more positive responses than any of my other NYT comments (405 recommends and counting). It is always hard to judge why some comments resonate positively and others do not. One reason is its position in the queue - early responses get the most hits. Other reasons include its length (short is better than long) and coherence (spelling and grammatical errors tend to turn people away from an idea, no matter how compelling it might be).

One reason I think the comment did so well, apart from the formulaic reasons stated above, is the simple beauty and benevolence of vegetables. They are so wholesome and the most wholesome part of any agricultural imaginary. Yes, collecting eggs from the chickens, milking the cow, and even slopping the pig and shoeing the horse all add to a place's bucolic charm, but a waving field of grain, or better yet, the simple vegetable plot, small but variegated, holds the most appeal, I think. The latter is the less industrial. Large fields of a single crop call to mind the serried rows of tractors that were often depicted in mid 20th century representations of agricultural production in both capitalist and communist contexts. Plants are what feed us. Everything else is a luxury, and often a fraught and messy one at that.

Personifying vegetables complicates our seemingly benign engagement with them. A friend and former colleague of mine described to me recent 'advances' in maple syrup collection/production that involve manipulations of the sugar maple trees that, as he put it, call to mind the industrial extraction of milk from cows. It is a troubling image for anyone who pays close attention to quickly evolving scientific and philosophical understandings of plants.

So the lesson is . . . eat your vegetables but treat them nicely?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html 

It Looks A Lot Better, Neighbor!

This comment was made by a man who walked by my house as I was, yet again, chopping down 'weeds'. I can't tell you how my heart sank whenever I came across a ladybug, a moth or some other insect clinging to a slender blade of . . . . grass, weed . . . ? Whatever you want to call it, I can't overstate how much better a full, intact and unmolested plant looks in comparison to a chopped down version. The man, as nice as he seemed, could not have been more wrong.

In fact, his comment was made in reference to the wild garden I had let thrive all this rainy winter long. Plants grew as they liked, including a beautiful patch of dandelions or something - sorry, I don't know the names of plants and like it that way - who - who! - liked to turn their pretty yellow faces to the sun whenever it was out. They curled up and hunched over, protectively, whenever the rain, cold and clouds came. How wonderful it was to see them living their lives and responding to the elements in which they lived.

Until I chopped them down.

One day, I noticed that my next door neighbor, not the man who made the comment, had turned toward my weed patch, and seemed to be admiring the cluster of pretty yellow flowers that grew near her carefully manicured lawn. I am sure she saw the beauty of the wild plants, living - and dying - in response to the environment. It was a particularly sunny day after a long rainy stretch, so I am sure she was charmed by their excited opening as they waved in the breeze, hosting a countless number of insects at the same time.

Until I chopped them down.

Strangely, I can't help noticing that the prettiest flowers tend to crop up in places that are either protected or disturbed, or both. Why, for example, are there clusters of purple flowers at the base of each of the posts that support the handrails on either side of my front steps? Why does the lavender resurge each spring in the secluded corner created by the meeting of the stucco-coated balcony and house wall? Why does the violet flower under the the purple flower tree (again, apologies, names escape me, I am sure not accidentally) flower around this time each year?

Apparently lupine is nitrogen-fixing. I once entertained a theory that because nitrogen-fixing activity is particularly frequent in disturbed soils, that certain forms of development, and by this I mean building activity, actually support the growth of certain species. It is the same idea I notice in studies of undersea structures of oil rigs that become coated in barnacles. Think of all of the insects, birds and rodents who - who! - thrive in the nooks and crannies of urban architecture.

So, the house does look better, the stark lines of its architecture more evident with the removal of the smudging organic matter.

But the scene as a whole, contrary to the approving words of my presumed neighbor, does not look 'a lot better'. Not by a long shot.

In Response to Casey Williams' Piece in 'The Stone' in the New York Times

Apropos of my earlier comment that commentary is fungible; that is, that comment about one thing (film) can stand as comment for another thing (life), I offer this as a standard statement of my view on the relation between science and politics. One need only substitute 'plant ontology' for 'fetal development' to make it an assertion about vegetal rather than human life. 

One does not find these manipulations of truth only on the right. The contortions and gyrations by the left on the relation between scientific understandings of fetal development and philosophical and legal assessments of human personhood match anything you see produced by conservatives on other issues. The stance by the president on abortion is the most scientifically creditable position he has. It is the trump card, so to speak, that won for him the election. Until the Democrats take a more nuanced and scientifically accurate position on abortion, they will always suffer from a lack of credibility, even though on many other issues they are far more in line with and attendant to observable scientific fact than the Republicans are.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/opinion/has-trump-stolen-philosophys-critical-tools.html

EXCERPT: Davos (5)

He thought about the handsome border guard. What was he doing now? Bored, looking at his watch, not even halfway through his shift? Standing, but not like the stolid donkey, animated, engaged, chatting, human, and not walking, like Franco. Franco could not stop walking. He actually tried to stop and he couldn’t, like the woman and reading. His legs were in automatic, as was his breathing, and his heartbeat.

Fluttering up above . . . flutter fall, flutter fall, flutter fall . . . Franco looked at his hand . . . flutter fall, flutter fall . . . the wind was inside him now . . . flutter fall . . . moisture from the leaves . . . flutter fall . . . bark smooth and peeling . . . flutter . . .

Franco was still now. He had stopped walking, and he stood stolid like the donkey staring, staring, staring . . .

He looked at the tree. Smooth bark appealing, wrinkle where the limb joined the tree . . . hello, friend, Franco said, seeing the tree for the first time since he left the house, horrified by the lives of the plants he left behind there, poor captives, the border guard, the woman who worked in the propane store . . . no, here now, with this tree . . . this tree . . . how did he find it out of these thousands and millions all around him . . . what could he possibly say to those he left behind in the house . . .

The fish weeps in the dry riverbed. Too late he is sorry he flopped across the shallows. Now he wants to go back, and warn all the other fishes.

Franco now had his hand on the tree and could feel its smooth cool bark. It felt better, his hot palm cooled by the smooth cool bark, drinking in the tree, drinking in its wetness and moisture, its cellular coolness and regularity soothing his complicated innards, the inside of the fig, crimson and scarlet, seminal in its unctuous and seeded interior, greeny white on the outside like the tree was yellow greeny white on its inside . . . greeny white tree and moisture . . . here, this tree . . .

Franco knew he was in a trance and did not want to leave it. But he knew that knowing that he was in a trance was a sign that he was coming out of it, just as stopping and staring was a sure sign that he was entering it. Is this what the donkey was feeling? The revelation generated enormous respect in Franco fro the donkey, but left his warmth for the goat in place. The town, the fetid town, in the base of the valley, was finally behind him, fetid and tiny and far, far away.

The tree, so different from the fig tree, was another heartbreak, as he felt his body move away, up the grade, oblique but now brighter with sunlight filtering through the crowns of the trees, standing, standing, standing, like the donkey, but so much more, both in number and in . . . expertise? Trees were excellent at standing. Franco felt the same warmth for the donkey that he had felt for the goat. The donkey was a good stander too, a donkey stander.

In Response to David Brooks' Column in the New York Times II

I am on the cusp of the boomers and gen x, but one who is far more comfortable with the skinny-tied eggheads with cigarettes curling smoke between their fingers on black and white television screens than with the sleeveless emoters who seem to lack a healthy sense of pessimism, which allows them to wrap everything up in the time it takes to make a smoothie. I join Brooks in mourning the shift from the former to the latter in public discourse. Indeed, I really don't think the former exists anymore, so I take refuge in 20th century intellectualism, each era as satisfying as the other but in its own unique way. Yes, Freud, Marx, Gramsci, Orwell . . . but let's not forget the great auteurs of cinema who emerged over the century, especially those of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. What I really hope for, however, is the return of old theological terms such as sin, evil and grace, to the stage of public discourse. They are as valid as ever, despite the challenges posed by science and the rational positivism that predominates in the current era, most distressingly in naive forms of scientism. As Michel Serres says: Where do you put the dirt, that is, the things that cannot be explained? No matter how many answers you have, there are always more questions, and therefore an attendant mystery that cannot and should not be ignored, as it adds so much savor to life.

Just as Pauline Kael, a now-deceased and therefore erstwhile film reviewer for The New Yorker, once said that talking about films is just a way of talking about life, or something to that effect, I find that anything I say is really just a way for me to talk about plants. My comment above is not obviously about plants, and perhaps not about plants at all, but the one idea contained in it that connects strongly to my interest in plants comes in the last sentence: plants are just so damned mysterious that I find them utterly fascinating. And the more that science tells us about plants, the more mysterious they become, because while they were at one point just grey-green shapes in the landscape that elicited little attention, they have now emerged, or now emerged only in the pitifully limited context of contemporary industrial socity, as agents in their own right, and to accommodate this debut, we must embrace them as much with scientific curiosity as with a respectful ignorance, the latter providing the fertile humus for our wonder.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/opinion/this-age-of-wonkery.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0