The front page of the Troy Record this morning pictured a young white man in prison blues sitting next to an attorney in court, and the headline read “Pluff Pleads Guilty to Rape on Bike Path.” The victim agreed to the plea because it meant she wouldn’t have to testify. Pluff got sentenced to 20 years, but I’m not sure how long before he’ll be up for parole (it’s too soon for it to appear on the DOC website). I’ve mentioned that I’ve done prison advocacy work, and I will continue to do so, but when it comes to sexual assault and prison abolition, my feelings tend to trump my politics. I’m one of the lucky ones, but I have loved ones who have been raped, molested, and tortured. It’s hard to reconcile these two issues for me, especially if the rapist white (statistically, the majority of them are). Let the mofo rot in prison and maybe even get a taste of his own medicine for all I care. I admit it: I feel this way about sex criminals, and this feeling causes some tension with anti-cop, anti-prison movements.

When I went online to reread the story later that morning, I noticed another disturbing headline: “Restaurant Worker Arrested for Abduction.” His victim was luckier–she managed to miraculously escape from a moving van and run for help, but only after she had been forced to strip at gunpoint.

According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), “Sexual assault has fallen by more than 60% in recent years.”  That’s a good thing, for sure, but on a day like today when I’m reading about a rape and an attempted rape in the same paper, it doesn’t feel like much has changed.

RAINN also cites stats that “73% of sexual assaults were perpetrated by a non-stranger.”  Not true in these two cases: both the local incidents in today’s paper were committed by total strangers. The Record reports that the DA acknowledged that this is rare, and “that fact makes this crime extremely unusual and dangerous. ‘These are the kinds of cases where the likelihood of serious injury or assault is the highest,’ he said.”  The Record also reports that this is also the second local case of a victim narrowly escaping a would-be rapist in the last four years: “Such cases are rare in this community. An attempted kidnapping occurred in the Saratoga Springs High School parking lot on Halloween 2005, when a high school student narrowly escaped from her would-be abductor, a Connecticut man who was subsequently convicted. [DA] Murphy said the two cases are ‘like lightning striking twice.’”

Hopefully so. RAINN’s most recent numbers say 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. When I was a grad student in the mid-1990′s, that number was more like 1 in 4 (college students remain a higher risk group for sexual assault). Even with a decrease in numbers overall, RAINN reports that there is a victim of sexual assault in the US every two minutes, and that there were 248,300 reported victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in 2007. And, this number doesn’t include the estimated 60% of unreported sex crimes.

The woman who didn’t want to have to relive her experience in court is still a hero to me because she survived. The woman who kept enough of her wits about her while being driven naked at gunpoint to a remote location so she could jump from the back seat of a van into the front and then out the door so she could run to safety is also a hero because she survived. We all have to save ourselves in a rape culture, however the hell we can. You two ladies and the other 248,298 victims this year are in my thoughts.

You know what doesn’t motivate me?  A mostly white panel of politicians and entrepreneurs perpetuating the notion that the system can work for everyone if we’d only just get effin’ motivated. Why pay to listen to a bunch of neo-con cheerleaders help us navigate our way to financial stability? Why aren’t we instead demanding radical re-appropriation of assets and  resources? Why should any of us be motivated to increase someone else’s profits at the expense of our very lives?  Perhaps the near-total alienation from the fruits of our labor coupled with the ever-present expectation of increased productivity while serving capitalist interests are interfering with our ability to “get motivated.” Perhaps the utter unlikeliness that the majority of the population will ever earn in a lifetime even a small percentage of what the top 1% makes in a month is slowin’ us down.

My BF recently forwarded this article to me:  “Quitting the Painting Factory” by Mark Slouka (Harper’s, November 2004–thanks to Adamantne for generously posting it). Slouka historically connects the acceptance of near-perpetual work to fascism, and he does so pretty convincingly too. Slouka reports that the Futurist art movement in turn-of-the-20th-century Italy had a manifesto that  stated, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the muse­ums, libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited by work.” Sound like George W? Slouka thought so too.

Slouka  also writes:

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic.

That distinction between leisure and idleness is an important one. It supports the system if we golf, travel, dine out, etc. It doesn’t if we stay home and read, or create, or rest. Of course, abandoning a comfortable, often-white, upper-middle-class lifestyle in favor of a simpler existence probably takes proper financial planning. It’s also pretty hard to eat and be clothed and sheltered without any income. Working so hard for the basics (and the not-so-basic) prevents us from challenging the economic and political climate–and that’s exactly what the 1-percenters require to keep the cycle of exploitation in tact.

As someone whose date of birth places her firmly within Generation X, I’ve been called a slacker on more than one occasion–even though I’m well-educated and self-sufficient (the behemoth unpaid balance on my student loans notwithstanding). I remember being 21 and working at Sears in display and merchandising because I couldn’t find a “real job” back in 1990. I was sitting on the floor in the children’s department; I had just pulled up some carpeting where we were gonna build some shelves. I was scraping at the bits of glue still stuck to the floor when the general manager, a white man in his 40s at the time, loomed over me and laughed. “I’ll bet your parents are glad they sent you to college so you could scrape floors,” he  wise-cracked as he walked away. I’ve never forgotten that moment–in fact, that guy made my already pissed-off-at-the-system politics even more crystallized.

It wasn’t my lack of education that bothered my baby-boomer boss; it was my lack of anything to show for it by way of a hot job or stock portfolio (It obviously didn’t occur to him that I took out student loans and worked every weekend my entire four years at URI, so maybe I lacked the family connections to land a Fortune 500 gig right out of school–not that I would have taken it, even then). Later in life, my decisions to not marry or have children have often gotten me labeled “immature.” The same is true with my decision to support myself as a food server. Any practice that challenges the frenetic uber-success ethics or gender expectations of our times is also seen as “unconstrained” and “anarchic.”

So be it. Now that I’m home from work today, I’m motivated to sit at the kitchen table with my gorgeous BF, eat fresh veggies from the garden,  and daydream. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty idle plan.

Hmmm. On a personal level, my attention span has decreased steadily since my thirties. When I was 34, the only way I was able to complete my doctoral exams  was by taking Prozac–it worked, and I was able to focus, but I hated being on antidepressants (I tried Ritalin and Adderall too, but neither had the desired effect–it felt more like I was intravenously injecting Red Bull). I’m inclined to wonder if it’s not so much reading online that is shortening our attention spans as much as simply being online or otherwise in front of some sort of screen–all the time.

I work in public service, both in a library and a cafe, and I’ve noticed a general decrease in patience, attention, listening skills, and comprehension in the last decade. You have no reason to take my word for it, or believe my “anecdotal evidence”  as Carr would say, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. Multitasking has taken on a whole new meaning these days: I regularly encounter individuals texting while ordering food or inquiring for assistance at the reference desk. But, as Carr suggests, “anecdotes alone don’t prove much” and we need to wait for the future results of long-term studies. Um, yeah, assuming the researchers have the attention spans to evaluate their data and publish a journal article. Waiting patiently isn’t exactly our strongest  attribute these days.

Carr does cite one UK study of online research habits. The study found  that the subjects skimmed,  “hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would ‘bounce’ out to another site.” He also cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts, who asserts that because of the instant gratification of hyperlinking, we are becoming less able to engage in deep reading.

The technological age is an epistemological break, and we’re in the midst of it as we speak. It’s not the first time a major technological change has made us wonder if it’s for the worst. Carr notes how the development of the mechanical clock in the 14th century changed how we perceived time. He also mentions the guy we can thank for maximum performance expectations while punching the clock, Frederick Winslow Taylor. With Taylorism, human labor is measured in terms of productivity. Carr connects Google with Taylorism because of Google’s quest to find perfect algorithms and thus create the perfect search engine. Carr writes:

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

And:

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

Carr is speakin’ my language here because I love a good opportunity to rant about the increased corporatization of our souls, but I still feel resistant to the point of view that our brains are going mushy mainly because of the develoment of new media.  Now, mobile phones on the other hand… : ) But seriously, if information is a commodity, access to information is a class issue. And there’s nothing really new about that.

I just received a copy of a new book published by SUNY Press: Sisters Outside: Radical Activists Working for Women Prisoners by Jodie Michelle Lawston. Lawston is a sociologist at DePaul, and her book examines issues that arise when activists on the outside advocate for incarcerated women. I’m excited to read it–I think it will speak to conflicts of white privilege that have arisen for me locally  when I’ve worked with prison support committees (albeit, on a much smaller scale). Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence has a Tools for Liberation packet which discusses the qualities of being an ally, especially how a  white person cannot name herself an ally to persons of color–that is a distinction that must be coined by a POC on a context-by-context basis. This means we may be considered allies for a specific action, but we must not assume that we will automatically be considered allies  thereafter. That kind of trust is hard to earn.

I don’t work on prison issues on a regular basis, but I have participated in a couple of actions in my adopted hometown. A few years ago two black men were arrested for assaulting a white police officer. There were extenuating circumstances, and one of the men was a minor in our neighborhood. Neither men could afford private counsel, so we got one lawyer to work pro bono and another to work fairly cheaply, and we raised funds for legal fees and commissary funds. I don’t think I ever felt my white, middle-class privilege more than the day I drove out to the county jail, cash in hand, to make a commissary donation. I didn’t even know what commissary meant–I had to stupidly ask at the committee meeting when volunteers were being solicited. I’m a WNP: white non-prisoner. My naivety was apparent that evening, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Although a quick glance at the index shows no reference to Audre Lorde, Lawston’s title echoes Sister Outsider, Lorde’s 1984 collection of prose written between ’76 and ’84. Her open letter to Mary Daly in 1979 is included in the collection. In that letter she speaks of her anger and dismay at Daly’s failure to not only discuss women of color in her book Gyn/Ecology, but also at Daly’s erasure of women of color by writing about white women’s history and traditions as if they represent all women.

This letter is now considered a primary text for women’s studies in the 1980′s because it holds white feminists accountable for their use of the word women as if it were a unified concept without race and class. Lorde writes, “[T]he oppression of women knows no ethnic or racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences” and that “beyond sisterhood there is still racism” (70). I’m excited to read Sisters Outside because it’s going to look at racial privilege, prison abolition issues, and how individuals who have never been incarcerated can still be effective advocates from the outside. I’ll post a review later.

Not that I’m that old-school. I have moved away from reading the newspaper in print, and I scan the “front page” of The New York Times, The Albany Times Union, and BBC World News (not a paper, but still) online on a daily basis. I also regularly visit Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, AlterNet, Counterpunch, Z-Mag, and even on occasion, The Onion. Am I “really reading” when I check the news online? I’d say yes and no.

Maestretti argues that the “real problem” isn’t whether or not we are
really reading. Instead, she asserts that “we have access to more information than ever, yet we do not know what to do with it. We are desperately information-illiterate.” Is this true? Again, I’d say yes and no. I often assist technologically challenged folks navigate their way through online job applications at, for example, the local grocery store chain’s website. They will often leave the “email” field blank, muttering, “but I don’t use email!” They become even more frustrated when they click “submit” and those red letters shouting “required field” appear. It’s a hard fact of the new millennium that even the lowest level jobs require some information literacy to apply, even if the job itself will never require an applicant to use a computer.

Maestretti does recognize that tech-savviness varies across age and class. She’s particularly concerned that teens who seem tech-savvy because they’ve got Facebook accounts and play video games are not necessarily able to evaluate information they find online: “Using search engines and databases fluently, and knowing how to find, filter, and assess accurate information, are skills that must be taught, by a parent, teacher, friend, or librarian.” As a library worker, I can vouch for the fact that this ain’t a generational thing. Maestretti says “what matters is not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers.” This has always been true, and critical literacy and critical thinking have long been buzzwords in education circles, so I’m not sure it’s merely reading and seeking information online that’s the issue.

Maestretti does raise the question of the driving force behind Google, bing, and other corporate search engines, and this is where she and I begin to see eye to eye: “Even champions of independent media tend to forget that the way we find information online is governed by private companies, not benevolent librarian types who want to unite us with the precise, accurate data we seek.”  It is something to think about: When we perform our latest verb, are we contributing to or participating in the corporate machine? Yes. And, no. Definitely maybe.

What I like about Google, and why I tend to use it more than any other search engine (when I want to use a search engine), is the lack of visual clutter. Sure, they have sponsored links, but the “ads” are text only. The difference between the kind of hits when googling “cancer” or “cannabis” are clear to me, but I have a lot of research experience. I think that’s the key: If an individual has already learned to evaluate print sources, odds are figuring out that surgery information provided by the National Library of Medicine is more credible than someone’s Under the Knife blog. Critical online literacy isn’t just about sources–it’s also about figuring out how to find those sources in the first place. Many individuals seem to be under the assumption that Google is in and of itself a primary source (e.g., “I read it on Google.”) I also have found that many individuals haven’t learned the distinction between a search engine and a database.  We are definitely 411 overloaded these days, and with the unemployment rate as high as it is, it’s crucial that information literacy advocates work toward access and instruction in addition to evaluation.

I must admit, I was pretty darn skeptical about Seth Grahame-Smith’s retelling of Pride and Prejudice with the added  plot element of zombies. Geeked out on Jane Austen already, and not particularly fond of zombies, I doubted not only Grahame-Smith’s language skills for adequately mimicking my (admittedly, dorkily) beloved early 19C prose, but also his ability to convincingly weave the undead into one of Brit Lit’s most familiar plots. I grew even more pessimistic when my 24-year-old hipster friend (who’s into neoprog and Wii, and who had never read Jane Austen before) heard about P&P&Z and fervently announced that zombies might be the only thing that could ever persuade him to read her (clearly the boy has neither sense nor sensibility). Dear reader, I was so freakin’ wrong! The book’s a total hoot.

Now, the undead don’t just suddenly appear when the Bingleys occupy Netherfield Hall. Instead, Grahame-Smith creates an England that has been plagued by zombies for years, and thus the Bennet sisters have all been superiorly trained in the “deadly arts” practically since infancy. Both their uncommon beauty and their terrifying skill with muskets and daggers are recognized throughout all of Hertfordshire.  At the assembly, when the dancing is rudely interrupted by umentionable menaces, the sisters Bennet enact a martial arts pentagram formation: backs to each other, circling outward,  a dagger in one hand with the other hand behind their backs for modesty’s sake:

These Misses Bennets majorly kick ass while observing the leisure class’s stringent rules of propriety.

I wouldn’t be me if I failed to comment on the one political difference I noticed in And Zombies: with the army (and all the eligible officers) engaged (heh heh) in destroying zombies instead of protecting the King’s interests in, oh, say, the West Indies, the marginal subtext of British colonialism barely present in Austen’s novel is pretty much gone completely. According to an article in today’s Guardian, Grahame-Smith has started quite a trend, and we’ll be seeing more classic novels, and even some historical bios rewritten to include the magical and the supernatural (apparently Grahame-Smith himself has a book deal to craft a tale about  Abe Lincoln as a vampire slayer). I wonder if this means we’ll observe even more historical erasures, or if just maybe some of these revisions will instead challenge our Eurocentric imaginations?