The late great British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke was an accomplished gleaner of information who often used to begin his ' weekly ' Letter from America ' radio broadcasts with a brief and seemingly free flowing stream of consciousness account of some event or chance encounter he'd had that would gently draw listeners into his unique idiosyncratic take on a particular aspect of political and  cultural life in the US or  the wider human drama. At the end of the broadcast Cooke would loop back to his opening ramble  and we'd instantly understand why. 

I was reminded of Cooke today when my friend mentioned that she had watched The Gleaners and I a French documentary  by Agnes Varda  that features the practice of Gleaning. and this sparked an interest as we had previously talked about the role of gleaners within the culture in another context.

The film deals with gleaning in the traditional sense, the collecting of leftover crops or food , I haven't seen the film so cant go into detail except that  the human stories of the gleaners are apparently  as interesting as their craft.

And gleaning is a craft as I told my friend that her description of the film reminded me of Henry Mayhew's writings on London Labour and the London Poor: in which Mayhew lists the various gleaners and scavengers struggling to make a living amongst the detrius , sewerage and street waste of Victorian London. Mayhew wrote objectively but with much compassion for his impoverished subjects.

Here's an excerpt.

On the Street-Finders or Collectors.

These men, for by far the great majority are men, may be divided, according to the nature of their occupations, into three classes:--

 

1. The bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers, who are, indeed, the same individuals, the pure-finders, and the cigar-end and old wood collectors.

 

2. The dredgermen, the mud-larks, and the sewer-hunters.

 

3. The dustmen and nightmen, the sweeps and the scavengers.

 

The first class go abroad daily to find in the streets, and carry away with them such things as bones, rags, “pure” (or dogs’--dung), which no one appropriates. These they sell, and on that sale support a wretched life. The second class of people are also as strictly finders; but their industry, or rather their labour, is confined to the river, or to that subterranean city of sewerage unto which the Thames  supplies the great outlets. These persons may not be immediately connected with the streets of London  but their pursuits are carried on in the open air (if the sewer-air may be so included), and are all, at any rate, outof- door avocations. The third class is distinct from either of these, as the labourers comprised in it are not finders, but collectors or removers of the dirt and filth of our streets and houses, and of the soot of our chimneys.

 

The two first classes also differ from the third in the fact that the sweeps, dustmen, scavengers, &c., are paid (and often large sums) for the removal of the refuse they collect; whereas the bone-grubbers, and mud-larks, and pure-finders, and dredgermen, and sewer-hunters, get for their pains only the value of the articles they gather.(continued)

 

This type of impoverished gleaning and scavenging still goes on in most big cities in poorer parts of the world where communities have grown up around and live off public rubbish dumps , its unhealthy, dangerous back breaking work and  occassionally gangs even fight for control over the dumps and the richest pickings.

This is the Smokey Mountain rubbish dump city in Manilla.  

"You have to have a dream, and believe that it's not your destiny, that it's not God's will for you to be impoverished like that"

Father Ben Beltran, a Catholic priest working with the Smokey Mountain community on a new housing project.

 

Closer to home we have the dumpster diving and freeganism, political and , at the moment, somewhat  trendy responses to our throwaway  culture which are routinely championed on youtube .Of course the rural and urban poor have always gleaned and scavenged here too, they have had to,  but they never make it into Society features in the  Guardian or New York Times .

In the UK, Unreality TV  ran a Reality TV program about 10 people forced to live off a rubbish dump for three weeks as a sort of 'Waste Idol' competition.

in the US, a  charitable  organisation called Gleaners set up by a Jesuit brother in Detroit  in the 1970's to combat hunger, homelessness and poverty, still collects and distributes food in various places in Michigan. In the age of mass produced food and global hunger we probably all need to learn to glean better rather than just carelessly throwing food or anything that can be recycled away.

The web has become a great tool for gleaners as well , people obviously use the net to glean information - its original purpose - but E-bay does a lot of trade in scavenged goods and on Craigs List and similar sites  people post junk for free to anyone who wants to collect it. Its a gleaners paradise and people routinely surf to glean free software , resources and discount coupons and other freebies as well .

The net is transforming us all into gleaners  but Governments and corporations are also increasingly using the net to glean personal information about us and these developments are pretty sinister and need to be resisted as they are gleaning away our rights.

As for Alistair Cooke , well, he made the headlines again post mortem  in 2006 when it was discovered that a criminal gang had stolen   organ, bone and tissue from hundreds of bodies, including his,  in New York funeral parlours and sold them on to legitimate research and medical facilities The gang made up of funeral directors, surgeons and entrepreneurs and led by former dentist Michael Mastromarino gleaned body parts from corpses  and sent then on for burial or cremation padded out with newspaper and cheap plastic piping in place of bones.

Mastromarino boasted that he could make from  $100,000 to $150,000 per body.

Its amazing that these bourgeoise pillars of the community could convince themselves that stealing often diseased body parts unfit for human transplantation and recycling and feeding them back into the healthcare system for exactly that was merely gleaning and a respectable way of buying themselves and their families a firmer footing within the American Dream and putting their fresh faced kids through college.. 

Isnt it ironic that our bodies are worth far more money than most  of us will ever have.

the birth of tragedy

Its got  to the point where we welcome catastophic disasters with horrendous death tolls whether they happen to us or anyone else because we know the earth needs to breathe and we arent letting it.

We're riding the Tyger and breaking its back.  

On the day US law enforcement announced that they'd  busted the world's biggest ID theft scam run by a former CIA  informant i realised that a market for trading physical identity wouldnt be such a bad thing. Sure , in the future people will design what their kids look like in a WYSIWYG  app from a range of simple pull down menus and premier membership  add on genetic enhancements  running to quite an expense but for now what do we do other than use the blur, dodge and lighten tools in Photoshop to present and market ourselves as the beautiful people we know ourselves to be inside?

There was a time when ugly meant something.

People would think, 'fuck s/he looks lived in and  ugly,  I bet her/his life has been interesting' but with plastic surgery now being something bored 23 year olds get into when they feel their profiles  or jawlines   no longer stop the traffic  ugly has been ejected from the interestingness room to the consequences of  poverty realm.

I'd like to think ugly could make a comeback in my lifetime. Saving that, I think I am going to save up to  have some surgery to look like Brad Pitt.

bears for oil

Today polar bears were finally  listed as  threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is melting away.

Interior Department Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said that dramatic declines in sea ice over the last 30 years  and projections of continued losses meant that the polar bear is a species likely to be in danger of extinction in the near future. Kempthorne also warned that the decision should not be viewed as a path to address global warming saying it would be "wholly inappropriate" to use the protection of the bear to reduce greenhouse gases, or to broadly address climate change.

The Endangered Species Act "is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy," said Kempthorne, reflecting a view recently expressed by President Bush. Kempthorne outlined a set of administrative actions and limits to how it planned to protect the bear with its new status so that it would not have wide-ranging adverse impact on economic activities from building power plants to oil and gas exploration. He also explained that arctic ice loss looked set to increase and quicken and that two thirds of the ice bear population would probably disappear by mid century .

Critics accused the US Government of adopting a ' sink or swim ' approach to the fate of the ice bears.  

Environmental  legal pressure group  EarthJustice   said they welcomed  protection for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act, but called on the government to cease  oil and gas activities in polar bear habitat. 

The Arctic is melting and polar bears are feeling the heat," said Earthjustice attorney Clayton Jernigan. "We need a time out on further oil activity in the Polar Bear Seas until we all understand what measures are necessary to protect the polar bears, other wildlife, and people that live in this rapidly transforming ecosystem."

EarthJustice accused the Bush administration of using a loophole called a 4(d) rule that appears calculated to limit protection for the ice bears and their shrinking sea-ice habitat in areas where oil and gas development is planned or proceeding , extending   no greater protection from oil and gas development than they previously had under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

A listing that should have enabled a reprieve is configured more like an execution warrant. Its a charter for an invasive species not appropriate protection for endangered polar bears.

"By listing the bear as threatened, instead of endangered, and adopting weaker protections for polar bears and their habitat, the administration is attempting to make it easier for oil and gas development to proceed on a fast track in prime polar bear habitat," said Jernigan. "Earthjustice will continue to work hard to protect polar bears and their habitat."

Earthjustice is currently involved in three separate legal actions aimed at protecting polar bears and their remaining habitat in the Polar Bear Seas.

El Corazón de Frida by autotelic

As the peso and Mexican stocks fall against the  now depressingly familiar background of soaring food prices Mexican drug cartels   desperate to retain control of their own lucrative drugs markets have hit back at a Mexican Government led campaign to break them up by murdering 5 high ranking  policemen in the last week.

At the funeral of one of the victims Mexican President Felipe Calderon said  , 'We have to come together to confront this evil, we Mexicans have to definitively and categorically say, 'That's enough!' adding "We can't accept this situation, we have to take back our streets."

Despite deploying 25,000 troops to smash the drug cartels who are responsible for most of the dope, coke and speed that hits the streets in the US and Canada ,  the Mexican authorities are  struggling as the cartels respond to official pressure put on them with precision killings of policemen and other authority figures and the use of ruthless lethal violence against anyone else they consider to be a threat to them.

There were 2,500 drugs related killings in Mexico last year and there have been 1,100 up to May this year.The cartels are effectively operating as terrorist organisations funded by North American drug users who may well face price rises for their drugs as the battle between the cartels and the Mexican Government committed to breaking their murderous grip on Mexican society ratchets up.