Erica Grieder

Baylen J. Linnekin in the Washington Times:

Federal agents watched the home closely for a year, gathering evidence. Then, in a pre-dawn raid, armed members from three agencies swooped in.

No, this is not a retelling of the lightning U.S. commando attack in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden. Rather, the target of the raid late last month by U.S. marshals, a state police trooper and inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was Amish farmer Dan Allgyer of Kinzers, Pa. His so-called “crime” involved nothing more than providing unpasteurized, or raw, dairy milk to eager consumers here in the Washington area.

Well, that seems like an overreaction. I wrote about raw milk in 2010, and was surprised by the depth of feeling on both sides. On balance, I think raw milk sales should be allowed. Pasteurization mitigates the risk of food-borne illness, but people can decide for themselves if they want to chance it. 

The other argument against raw milk, from Big Dairy, that an outbreak of illness related to raw milk could damage the industry more generally, but that risk is one we routinely accept with other forms of food, and the dairy lobby, of course, might have an ulterior motive. Allowing raw milk sales, that is, helps small farmers. It's a little bit hard to say how big the market is, as it's largely illicit, but if a farmer sells milk to a distributor, they get about $1.40 a gallon for it. If they sell it directly to the consumer as the premium product of raw milk, they can charge $5 or $6 a gallon. So even though running a raw milk operation has some extra costs--you have to pay for licensing and testing--it would be a boost to small operators. And they could use a boost:

I don't put much stock in the hocus-pocus benefits that serious raw milk enthusiasts tout, but if you haven't tried it, you might as well, unless of course you're chicken. If you're in Austin, a nearby option is Dyer Dairy.

So obviously I was pretty geeked out to see Robert Caro at the Bob Bullock Museum last night, for a conversation moderated by Texas Monthly's Bob Sweany. A few points of interest:

A casual observer could get the impression that Caro started writing his multi-volume biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, because he had some deep and abiding interest in LBJ. That's not just because he's devoted several decades and thousands of pages to the subject, but because he seems to be in the character-as-destiny camp. Power may corrupt, but it always reveals, as he says in the most recent volume, and what is revealed shapes the destiny of the character in question and the character's entire field of influence (which is, in the case of LBJ, the entire country).

Yet as Caro has said before, he was never drawn to LBJ because of any particular interest in LBJ, or in big names more generally. Rather, his interest is in political power: how it can be acquired, and how it can be used. As he described it tonight, the first four volumes of the LBJ biography are framed around aspects of this question: the power of rural politics, in The Path to Power; stealing elections as a way to get power, in The Means of Ascent; the wielding of legislative power, in Master of the Senate; and now, the transition to the power of the presidency during a moment of national crisis, in The Passage of Power.

The fact that this is why Caro took an interest in Johnson is, perhaps, one of the factors that puts him in a separate category from the other people who have written at length about LBJ, or for that matter, the Kennedys. The other biographers, that is, have often had some kind of emotional investment in the person. As an outlying example, here's Doris Kearns Goodwin, describing how Johnson used to come into her room before dawn to talk: "His voice on these occasions was soft, so soft, it was sometimes hard to understand but on this morning the pain and sadness in his tone was so striking that I forced myself to comprehend every word."

That level of intimacy is a little unusual in a political biography. But so too is Caro's more detached approach--unsurprisingly, on balance. How often does it happen that someone writes an epic biography of a major historical figure not because they have a strong opinion about the person in question, or about the consequences of his actions, but because they happen to be interested in an abstract concept that the figure in question experienced and projected in interesting ways? It's like writing 4000 pages about Genghis Khan because his life strikes you as a useful prism through which to examine the nature and limits of religious pluralism.

As for Caro, one thing he did seem to care about deeply was process. He had an understated affect when asked directly about it He doesn't have a computer in his office, he said, but if there is a need to Google something, his wife, luckily, is a computer genius. But at several points he elaborated on research and sourcing considerations in a way that suggested the subject was close to his heart. It was lucky that Johnson had two aides with him on the day that he first met Robert F Kennedy, because that interaction was so revealing, and really set the tone for what was to come; but he only uses a story if he has two sources for it, so it was the fact that he talked to both of the aides in question, and they both described the same instant animus between the two men, that allowed the story to be retold. Despite all the billion biographies of Kennedy, and the intense focus on that day in Dallas, nobody had ever looked at what Johnson was doing from the moment the motorcade heard the first crack of the rifle, so he, Caro, had a chance to do it; it wasn't a great research job on his part, he continued, because he didn't have to dig very far, he just went to the LBJ Library and asked them if they happened to have a copy of the incident report that the Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood, the one who threw Johnson to the backseat of the third car and covered him with his body, would have filed, and sure enough they did. It was in a grey binder. Knowing what he knows now, he was asked, is there anything he wishes he could change about the earlier volumes? No, he said.

Paula Marantz Cohen worries that her students are so concerned about curating their identity that they're losing sight of the lived experience:

Walker Percy addressed a similar phenomenon in his 1954 essay, “The Loss of the Creature.” He discussed how our anticipatory framing of an experience, especially a visit to a famous place, keeps us from relating to what we are seeing in an unmediated way.

What my student described is an exaggerated example of this sort of detached relationship to living. The experience is superseded by its representation on a Facebook page. The self is edited and framed in the manner that one might curate a museum exhibition.

There are actually two issues here: detachment, or the failure to experience life because you're too concerned about how you will have experienced it, and positioning, which is intentionally albeit perhaps semi-consciously representing (or misrepresenting) yourself to others. Neither is a new phenomenon, and both are more complicated than they initially appear.

Detachment, for example, is generally a bad thing, the opposite of engaging. In her forthcoming memoir, for example, the author Terry Tempest Williams describes how her mother bequeathed her her journals--years and years worth of blank books. Williams is understandably perplexed by that: on the one hand, it can be interpreted as the mother's gentle rebuke of the daughter's lifelong tendency to analyze what happened rather than experiencing it. (She also suggests that it can be interpreted as a critique of religion--her mother was Mormon, and Mormons are encouraged to keep a daily journal (?)--or perhaps as a bit of posthumous mischief). On the other hand, some capacity for critical reflection never hurt anyone, and particularly during moments of distress it is common advice to try to observe the events and feelings happening to you as though you were floating six inches above your own head.

As for the positioning--I suppose we all do it occasionally (job interviews, dates), but as with any other form of fibbing, the effort required to maintain a convincing facade over the long haul is so considerable that few people are genuinely capable of it. The better strategy would be to take cues from your own positioning about what kind of person you're trying to be, and then become that person, so those traits are just naturally manifested. And if you're going to be criticised you might as well be criticised for the flaws you actually have, in which case some measure of fairness is preserved.


The underappreciated upside to the fact that so much of this self-curation is now being done online is that it's become easier to see how other people position themselves, which is typically revealing, and often touching.

Relatedly: "The Art of the Impersonator," Sanford Schwartz on Cindy Sherman.

It looks like people turn up the twang when they want to be charming. I'm not aware of doing that consciously, but I'm aware of sounding more Texan when I'm talking to old people, Texans, political partisans (?), and strangers. I think thus fiddling with your own accent is less fraught in the United States than in, say, Britain. This story explains how researchers at UT's Texas English Project studied baristas from Bouldin Creek by asking them to read "Arthur the Armadillo" out loud, twice:

“To get a baseline of their maximum dialect speech, we asked them to sound really Texan,” Hinrichs said. “And we found all the textbook features of the Texas twang, like pronouncing words like ‘five’ as ‘faav’ and ‘pie’ as ‘pah.”

Hinrichs said this finding confirms the Texas twang continues to exist as a resource, but people are using it more as a social commodity.

A new post at Democracy in America.

David Sessions at Patrol:

Democracy as we generally conceive it is a structure for managing and containing conflict, a framework for legitimate political struggle. There will always be factions, sides, particular interests, etc, and those imply we will have political friends and enemies. Deep down, I think describing serious political conflict as a “culture war” is part of the liberal allergy to vigorous debate; it tries to shove deep disagreements into a corner with some kind of label indicating that this is not welcome in “reasonable” discourse.

(H/T: The Daily Dish).

Getting ready for the tUnE-yArDs show next week and stumbled across this 1983 essay by Kim Gordon:

As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy. Performers appear to be submitting to the audience, but in the process they gain control of the audience's emotions. They begin to dominate the situation through the awe inspired by their total submission to it. Someone who works hard at his or her job is not going to become a "hero," but may make just enough money to be able to afford to be liberated temporarily through entertainment. A performer, however, as the hero, will be paid for being sexually uncontrolled, but will still be at the mercy of the clubs and the way the media shapes identity. How long can someone continue to exert intensity before it becomes mannered and dishonest?

Shades of The Bacchae... (h/t: Matthew Perpetua)

I'm an alumna of the school in question. It wasn't so scandalous when I went there.

I actually made the same typo myself a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately it was in a blog post about the Republican primary so there were a lot of jokes to be made at my expense. Fortunately, you know, web publishing--it's easy to fix typos.

On the other hand, LBJ himself probably would have been amused.

A new story this week.