Happiness Maps, Then and Now

I wrote a few years ago about the American states where people reported being happiest, comparing that statistic with crime rates and food stamp usage. Those were self-reports of happiness, and that 2009 study found that the top-10 happiest states were mostly in the South (exceptions: Hawaii, Maine, Arizona, and Montana).



Well, today's happiness map isn't based on self-report. It's a combination of factors devised by Gallup that analyzes things like "emotional health, work environment, physical health, life evaluation, healthy behaviors, and access to basic resources." Perhaps better labeled as a map of well-being than happiness. And there's nary a southern state in the top ten. In fact, many of the happiest of all states in 2009 are among the least happy now:



Louisiana went from #1 for happiness to being one of the bottom 15; other former top-10 states that are now in the bottom 15 are Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Tennessee. Montana and Hawaii, in contrast, are the only two states to made it into the top 10 on both maps.

States like New York, which was at the very bottom of the 2009 happiness list, are in the midrange in 2011. Massachusetts went from the bottom 10 to the top 15.

So what does this mean? I assume the objective reality in these states may have changed a bit, since it's two years or so later. But there's more to it than that.

One possibility is that ignorance is bliss; some folks aren't aware that their lives suck, objectively. They're in the poor-but-happy group. The flip side of that is the idea that some people don't know how good they've got it, maybe because they've got a case of unfulfilled rising expectations. (If you live in New York and see the 1% driving past in a limo every day, you might be more resentful of your circumstances than a person who is objectively less well off than you but who's surrounded by people who are similarly hard up.)

Or maybe people in the usually blue states are more likely to feel free to complain about their troubles to a pollster, while those in the normally red states (or at least southern states) put up a brave front to the outsiders on the phone.

Losing Track of the Trackers

The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago that, after the Supreme Court decision outlawing warrantless GPS tracking of vehicles, the FBI turned off 3,000 of the little buggers.

They had 3,000 of these things on cars without a warrant. That's just the FBI, not state or local police.

And now -- get this -- they can't find them.

It might have been a good idea to go retrieve them first, then turn them off, hey? Unless the reason for leaving them where they were was so they can be turned back on again once they have a warrant. (Or whenever they feel like it even if they don't have a warrant; but that's just me being paranoid.)

Via Boing Boing

Photo from the Security Blog on Jammer-Store.com

Oh, Those Centuries

We've had an unwinter this year in Minnesota, so that's newsworthy, I guess. The Pioneer Press's story on Saturday included this graph of the snowiest and least snowy winters on record. Last year was the fourth snowiest, this year the fifth-least snowy:


The thing I noticed about the graph was the labels below the bars. The 20th century years after 1912 require only two digits, while the 19th and 21st century years (and 1901-02) have four digits for the first year in each set of two.

Obviously, they did it this way to differentiate 1894 from 1994 and 1901 from 2001. But still, it seems a bit odd.

The layout had already allowed enough space for six digits and a hyphen, turned sideways, so why not set all of the year ranges that way? Switching the orientations back and forth makes it harder to read and calls extra attention to the five year ranges that are set sideways.

Reading The Handmaid's Tale in the Time of Santorum

Spoiler alert: This post discusses details of the plot and writing of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
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The Handmaid's Tale is all about concealing and revealing.

The story line is concealed, the events that led to the narrator's present situation even more so, as much as her body is concealed inside a voluminous red dress and her head within a white winged headdress. Key points in the narrative are revealed intermittently, achronologically, until we finally understand, about two-thirds of the way through the book, how women were stripped of their rights and a theocracy named Gilead was established in what used to be the northeastern United States.

The biggest reveal of all -- that the story we're reading is a transcript made from cassette tapes found in Maine, where they had been left two hundred years earlier -- comes in the epilogue, framed as a presentation at a conference of academics who study past repressive religious states like Gilead and late-20th-century Iran.

Reading The Handmaid's Tale is almost like enduring Cormac McCarthy's The Road. You feel buried and terrified the whole time, but end with a sense of possible hope, unsure if it's justified.

I wanted to reread the book, though, given everything that's been happening lately in American politics with women's reproductive freedom. While I first read it in 1986, I can't remember my impressions of it. I'm still not able to write a literary treatise of it, as I might have been able in my college days, but I wanted to share some of Atwood's beautiful language, as well as her chilling premise.

Gilead Rising

How did the U.S. become Gilead? An insurgent religious Right is part of it. An overt coup happens, in which the president and most members of Congress are killed. (A bit far-fetched, yes, but it doesn't take a lot to imagine things akin to this in some of the rhetoric these days.) After a state of emergency is declared and the Constitution suspended, the regular people huddle in their houses, hoping not to be affected; only a few go into the streets to protest, and are rounded up. Porn and obscenity are outlawed, its sellers and makers disappeared. The regular people don't mind about that too much.

By the time of the coup, everyone was spending their money by using the equivalent of debit cards instead of cash, so one day the new government transfers all women's accounts to their nearest male relative, and commands that they be fired from their jobs. The narrator, whose only name is Offred, as far as we know, remembers:

I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.

Now we walk along the same streets, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. (page 33)

Environmental devastation is a little-described background to the action. Birth defects are rampant and male fertility has been affected by pollution and radioactivity, but it's women who are blamed for these failures. And so women like the narrator have been turned in Handmaids, whose qualifications are that they have given birth before, but were unmarried or in something other than a first marriage (no longer recognized as a marriage by the zealots in control of the government). They are turned into chattel, kept in the households of men from the Gilead hierarchy. When they reach their fertile time each month, they must lie between the legs of the Wife while the husband does his duty.

Gruesome, you bet.

Despite the fact that Gilead's women live in an almost completely separate sphere from men, they are not in any kind of solidarity. Instead, they stay within their rigid categories of Handmaids, Wives, Marthas (servants), and Aunts (indoctrinators and enforcers). Wives think the Handmaids are whores, even though the Handmaids have no choice in the role. When the Commander makes Offred visit him in the evenings in his study, she has no choice but to comply -- she has no power in the relationship. It's not even a relationship. But when the Wife, Serena Joy, finds out, she is outraged at Offred, not at her husband Fred. "How could you be so vulgar?" "Behind my back…. you could have left me something." "Just like the other one. A slut." The Marthas of the household, Cora and Rita, also look at Offred with narrow eyes and distrust for the most part, definitely not sympathy. Even the other handmaids are standoffish to each other, unsure who can be trusted in a society where secret police and spies are everywhere.

Atwood's use of language 

Yet throughout, there is beautiful language. And so many insights.

In the curved hallway mirror I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke. I have smoke on my mind all right, already I can feel it in my mouth, drawn down into the lungs, filling me in a long rich dirty cinnamon sigh, and the the rush as the nicotine hits the bloodstream. (page 270)

Not a dandelion in sight here, the lawns are picked clean. I long for one, just one, rubbishy and insolently random and hard to get rid of and perennially yellow as the sun. (page 275)

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. (pages 287-288)

During one of Offred's sessions with the Commander in his study, he lays out his perspective on how things used to be. It's like reading a page from Rick Santorum's script:

We've given them [women] more than we've taken away, said the Commander. Think of the troubles they had before. Don't you remember the singles' bars, the indignity of high school blind dates? The meat market. Don't you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn't? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery.

He waved a hand at his stacks of old magazines. They were always complaining. Problems this, problems that. Remember the ads in the Personal columns…. This way they all get a man, nobody's left out. And then if they did marry, they could be left with a kid, two kids, the husband might just get fed up and take off, disappear, they'd have to go on welfare. Or else he'd stay around and beat them up. Or if they had a job, the children in daycare or left with some brutal ignorant woman, and they'd have to pay for that themselves, out of their wretched little paychecks. Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business. This way they're protected, they can fulfill their biological destinies in peace. (pages 283-284)

At the end, Offred -- whose real name we never learn -- escapes from the Commander's house into the hands of the underground movement, but we are not told whether she got out of the country or not. The epilogue follows, telling us that she made it at least as far as Maine, and recorded her memories. The epilogue is full of wry inside jokes about academia, including this slap at cultural relativism (in the voice of the editor of Offred's tapes):

If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans. Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific. Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily free. Our job is not to censure but to understand. (page 383)

Clearly, Gilead was a flash in the pan, historically, from the point of view of Atwood's year 2195, and that is reassuring to read after so much emotional trauma and ugliness.

But I disagree with the historian's statement that it's wrong to pass moral judgment on the Gileadean way of doing things. Destroying freedom and replacing it with repression and control is an essential negative, and understanding it does not necessitate excusing it.

Bisecting Heads for Ron Paul

We had about three inches of heavy, wet snow a couple of days ago, bringing our total for this super-warm, dry winter to about 18". Yesterday I saw this along the streets of St. Paul:


This snowman is about 8 feet tall. Imagine what they could have done if it had snowed a foot.

Art Against Voter Suppression

The Hip Hop Action Coalition has set up voterid.us to share artistic works calling attention to the repressive Voter ID laws being considered in Minnesota and other states. They're open for submission of poems, songs, cartoons, posters, murals, dances, skits and videos.

So far, these are the two best posts.

I'm not sure who created the altered "I voted" sticker above, but this retro poster is by artist Ricardo Levins Morales:

I have to get busy and make them something.

A Few of the Many Tabs

Diane Ravitch recently had two essays in the New York Review of Books, related to the publication of Pasi Sahlberg's book about the highly successful Finnish schools. Part one is a neat summary of the critique of the school reform movement. Part two nails New York's recent move to evaluate teachers based on testing and objective criteria, even in art and gym.
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A Modest Proposal to create eternal copyrights. After all, "How can our laws be so heartless as to deny [your great-great-great-grandchildren] the benefit of your hard work in the name of some do-gooding concept as the 'public good', simply because they were born a mere century and a half after the book was written?"
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Freelance science writer Kevin Zelnio tells what it's like to be uninsured and have your six-year-old hospitalized for pneumonia. I suppose at least a few people in the audience at tonight's Republican debate would yell out "Let him die!"
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I hope to soon read Laurence Lessig's One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic. According to Boing Boing, it offers concrete changes we could make to our laws to repair our damaged democracy.

Morality Backed Up with a Gun

Some of my muttering at the newspaper lately has been about a Republican-proposed change to Minnesota's "castle doctrine." This is the state statute that makes it legal for you to kill someone who breaks into your home if you feel you or your family are in danger.

Our House and Senate Republican majorities want to change the law so that it applies not just inside your house but anywhere. You wouldn't have a duty to try and retreat to safety before using deadly force, and you wouldn't be held to a "reasonable person" standard either. The cases would hinge on the killer's state of mind, their subjective sense of what's reasonable. (See this op-ed by Dakota County prosecutor James Backstrom for more details.)

Jerry Dhennin of Coon Rapids had an excellent letter in today's Star Tribune, which said exactly what I have been thinking:

'Shoot first'
Supporters seem not to know existing law

Those writing letters in favor of the "shoot first" bill apparently haven't bothered to check out existing relevant law.

It is clear, in my opinion, that Minnesota statutes 609.06 and 609.065, taken together, authorize a person to use force, including deadly force, that is reasonably necessary to prevent an offense upon that person, or when assisting another.

Not written into these statutes is the requirement to first "retreat" from a confrontation if it is reasonable and safe to do so. Importantly, the requirement to retreat does not apply in one's home.

Minnesota's self-defense laws have worked very well for a long time. No one is in prison for acting reasonably in defense of one's self or home. There have been several cases in recent years of the use of deadly force by a person in defense of their home, and the defenders were not charged with any crime.

The bill proposed by Rep. Tony Cornish would seriously alter long-accepted standards of reasonableness, to the detriment of our citizens and the safety of law enforcement officers.

Our legislators would better serve if they paid heed to the positions of Minnesota's Police Chiefs, rank-and-file law enforcement officers and our state's County Attorney's Association, all of which adamantly oppose this bill.

Clearly this change in the law is meant to allow vigilantism, like the guy who shot and killed armed robber Darren Evanovich in South Minneapolis a few months ago. The shooter, who has not been identified, witnessed the robbery and pursued Evanovich, rather than retreating. According to the Star Tribune:

The witness, who had a permit to carry a handgun, drove up to Evanovich and asked for the purse back. Evanovich pointed his gun at the man and told him to mind his own business, and the man, still sitting in his car, aimed his own weapon and fired, according to a criminal complaint.

Prosecutors have decided not to charge the shooter, and that's under the current law. Clearly, there is no need for a change to make it even easier for vigilantes to take the law into their own hands. As Steven Pinker put it,

The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest (The Better Angels of Our Nature, p. 622).

Two updates: Former Champlin police chief Dale Kolb had a letter in the Strib a few days later in which he said: "Every three months I receive my NRA magazine in the mail, and I dutifully read the section about ordinary citizens who defend themselves with firearms.... As a cop, I always read them with our current law in mind. I have never read such an example that would not be allowed under our current law."

Unfortunately, the Minnesota Senate passed the revised castle doctrine bill on February 23 (the House had already passed it). The Strib story on its passage included this incredibly simple-minded quote from Bill Ingebrigtsen (R-Alexandria):

"Why wouldn't we let citizens ... protect themselves wherever they are in the state of Minnesota?" asked Ingebrigtsen, a former sheriff of Douglas County. "This bill is about good folks and giving them an opportunity to defend themselves."

Ingebrigtsen's inability or unwillingness to think of unintended consequences shows that he has no business working public policy.

I'm assuming Governor Dayton will veto the bill, but it wouldn't hurt to give him a call.

Romney Logo: Wimpy and Unclear

A friend and I were comparing the campaign websites of Obama, Romney, Santorum and Gingrich today, and I was reminded again how much I dislike Romney's logo.


First, as I've said numerous times before, it takes a lot for a non-letter to read as a letter. This R does not pass the test. It's easier to read the word as OMNEY than it is ROMNEY. And we all know you don't  have to try very hard to accidentally transpose the O and M and get a Freudian-slip-of-a-name.

Second, it's an odd, wimpy shape. It barely reads as an R at all because of the strange curve along the bottom. Why doesn't the red shape extend along the left vertical axis?

Third, the R doesn't have the graphic weight it should or the width to make sense alongside the wide letters in the rest of the name.

Fourth, it's set in Trajan, the over-used typeface of every movie poster in America.

Fifth, I didn't realize that the red, white, and blue shapes were supposed to be people until my friend pointed it out. Or maybe I kind of did, but it was a really weak association.

But I suppose it could be worse. It could tell an uncomfortable truth about Romney, as in this parody version I found on a Democrat-leaning website:



A few professional design observers gave their opinions of the major campaign logos here.

The Act of Grief in the Age of Social Media Reproduction

Death has always been with us, but in the age of the interweb, its social boundaries have shifted.

In the past, when a friend's relative died, you might have heard about it directly, through other friends, or by reading the obituaries in the newspaper. These days, the most likely place is Facebook. And it's that same friend who posts it, leaving you with the dilemma of whether to respond with a comment. Somehow, the phatic phrases that are acceptable when written on a card or said in person sound worse than empty in the house that Zuckerberg built. But not commenting seems awful, too.

When someone famous died in the past, you would hear through television, newspapers, or magazines. A person who was well-known within a niche area might not get any coverage. I remember when Audre Lorde died in 1992, I didn't hear about it for days. But when Gil Scott-Heron died last May, suddenly I found out how many people were fans as the RIP messages bled across the Twitterverse. (And let me add, those three capital letters should be laid to rest once and for all.)

This video by Scott-Heron fan Jay Smooth does a better job of talking about this than I can. Even if you know nothing about his music, it's worth watching. Smooth deals with the way that celebrities' lives feel personal, the mediation of experience, and the hipster reactions that are hard to suppress:



"If you love her so much why weren't you grieving for her when she was alive?"

O brave new world, that has such people in it.

Virginia's State-Sponsored Rape Law

I'd heard vague mention of Virginia's proposed "Want an abortion? Have an ultrasound" bill. I admit it didn't get far into my consciousness. I thought it was just another unreasonable impediment placed in the way of a woman wanting to do what she thinks is best for herself. It was obviously worse than a 24-hour waiting period or a forced reading of a fake side effect list, because it would cost money.

But I didn't realize how much worse it was.

Because if your pregnancy is at less than 12 weeks gestation -- as most terminated pregnancies are -- the ultrasound that's required isn't the familiar technique where a technician moves a sensor around on the woman's stomach. No. It's this:


The medical term is "transvaginal ultrasound,"and it is just what the picture shows.

Now, I'm a 50ish woman and I've had my share of pelvic exams. The speculum took a little getting used to at first, back when I was about 20. I've given birth, with all of the attending loss of body modesty that accompanies pushing out a 10-pound baby.

But having this type of ultrasound (which I had about a year ago) is the worst medical procedure I've had that I've been conscious for. Because of the shape of the "wand," as it's euphemistically called, the feeling that it's unwanted intercourse is pretty hard to avoid.

And I was voluntarily having the test, to find out something I needed to know. Hearing about the Virginia law, which is hard to call anything but state-imposed rape, literally makes my heart pound as adrenaline or stress hormones or something begin to spill into my system. My hands are shaking.

Virginia's legislature passed this law last Monday and the governor has spoken of it favorably.



Pictured above: The the only possible upside of this law. (Cartoon by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press.)

Arne Duncan Faces a Real Interview

Last night's Daily Show interview subject was Arne Duncan, secretary of education. Duncan carries the ball for the "reform" cause in the Obama administration, particularly Race to the Top.

I had such high hopes for education change when Obama came into office, and I have to say it's one of the areas of the most disappointment for me. (Right after raiding the homes of antiwar activists on the pretense that they give aid and comfort to terrorists.)

John Stewart -- who, as he is wont to remind us -- has a mother who is a teacher, and she has friends who are teachers. And so it's not surprising that they call John about this education reform thing. And they call a lot, it seems, because he's very well informed.

Stewart did a great job of not letting Duncan get away with platitudes, much as he tried.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Arne Duncan Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Some other recent education-related reading goodness:

Diane Ravitch giving a succinct primer on her critique of education "reform," plus a review of a new book on Finnish schools -- the right model for U.S. education.

A critique of the Chetty value-added study (that's the one that "proved" having just one great teacher leads to higher incomes).

A wonderful interview with Nancy Carlsson-Paige on what's wrong with testing mania and what kids need. (I know it's silly, but knowing that she's Matt Damon's mother made me wonder what she had to say. More importantly, she's a professor emerita of early childhood ed at Lesley University.)

Apologies for all of the air quotes.