May 2007

WoMag interviews Corey Dolgon
Allen Fletcher interviews Worcester State sociology prof Corey Dolgon on the socio-economic vibe of the city. If you like this, you might want to listen to an interview I did with him last year.

I had a little bit over-romanticized some of this post- industrialism in that it really wasn’t a post World War II de-industrialization, as much as it was like other New England towns, a kind of post World War I de-industrialization, and that Worcester has been struggling with these issues for a much longer time.

Plenty interviews OKC Catholic Worker Bob Waldrop
A nice article about Bob (who sometimes contributes to Pie and Coffee). Food co-op people take note:

Waldrop is the founder of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (OFC), a monthly buying club that connects Oklahoma customers with Oklahoma farmers. The first month it existed, the cooperative generated $3,500 from 60 members. Fewer than four years later the April 2007 order stood at nearly $36,500. That’s a lot of local food and a lot of money in farmers’ pockets, and OFC board members expect that number to nearly double by the end of the year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I talked with Catholic Worker Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who’s been appealing the conviction of seven protestors who in 2005 blocked the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC, to protest the Darfur genocide.

All of the briefs and motions have been filed, and with luck there will be “oral argument” of the appeal this summer. Scott talks about why he thinks his group is not guilty, and how he’ll convince the judges of that.

For more info, see Darfur Genocide on Trial.

You can download the mp3 (3MB) or see other formats. You can also subscribe (RSS) to the podcast.

May 25, 2005: Tom Lewis, Harry Duchesne, Brian Kavanagh, Liz Fallon, Brenna Cussen, Ken Hannaford-Ricardi, and Scott Schaeffer-Duffy are happy to be outside after a day in D.C. Superior Court.

Scott Schaeffer-Duffy: Darfur and the necessity defense [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

HBML, Worcester’s best visionary junk shoppe, is running low on cash. If you live in Worcester, perhaps you would like to visit them at 420 Pleasant St. If you live elsewhere, perhaps you would like to PayPal them $30 in exchange for a bunch of posters.

You know what they say about your neighborhood junk shoppe: use it or lose it.

Pie and Coffee accepts no advertising or donations, but at this point our daily readership is high enough that I feel like we should be using that untapped commercial potential for something.

This is a recording of a homily by Father Bernie Gilgun, from his weekly Mass at the Mustard Seed in Worcester, Massachusetts. You can download the mp3 (3MB) or see other formats. You can also subscribe (RSS) to the podcast.

Reading for May 4, 2007.

Standard Podcast [ 6:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Holy cow, Shannon! Good job!

T&G: Appeal stalls planned Wal-Mart: Quinsigamond Village abutters fault officials:

A group of abutters has temporarily put the brakes on the planned Wal-Mart Supercenter in Quinsigamond Village.

Three abutters to the “Worcester Crossing” shopping center development, to be built on 44 acres along the Blackstone River, have filed an administrative appeal with the Zoning Board of Appeals, claiming the Planning Board did not adhere to the city’s site plan review standards when it approved the first phase of the project in March.

Maybe this will buy some time. That’s just what the opposition needs. The fact that any effort has “put the brakes” on this thing at this point is a big surprise.

Video: Shannon Senior and John Harvey talk Wal-Mart.

Mohandas K. Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Chapter “Farewell”:

I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.

From the last two pages (“Epilogue”) of E. F. Schumacher’s book A Guide for the Perplexed (1977) (bold type added):

Admittedly, some of this change of mind stems not initially from spiritual insight, but from materialistic fear aroused by the environmental crisis, the fuel crisis, the threat of food crisis and the indications of a coming health crisis. In the face of these — and many other — threats, most people still try to believe in the ‘technological fix’. If we could develop fusion energy, they say, our fuel problems would be solved; if we would perfect the processes of turning oil into edible proteins [the Haber–Bosch process], the world’s food problem would be solved; and the development of new drugs will surely avert any threat of a health crisis … and so on.

[...] The modern experiment to live without religion has failed Read the rest of this entry »

I am assuming that the gentle readers of Pie and Coffee also get their news from the BBC and the Guardian so we don’t have to alert you to anything already reported there. Gentle readers might also already be subscribed to the free publications OSCE Magazine, and Finance and Development from the IMF.

But then gentle readers may want to spend some money and start receiving “the most intelligent political journal in the world”, the New Left Review, whose 160 punch-packed pages arrive neatly every two months. From this issue 44:

Sven Lütticken, Idolatry and its discontents:

[T]he veil has been hijacked by right-wing mouthpieces who routinely invoke the Enlightenment in a way that reduces critique to neatly packaged dogma for the age of the soundbite. One such Enlightenment fundamentalist is Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who during her years in Holland—she has since moved on to the US, to work at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute—wrote the script for a short film on the role of women in Islam. [...] Turning women wearing veils into the faceless face of otherness allows Hirsi Ali and her allies to ignore the questions raised by the rise of the veil in Europe—questions that can be uncomfortable for the heroic defenders of western liberal values. [...] Is the veil not effectively being used to unmask and lay bare the limits of Western liberalism—to reveal it as a sham, an ideology in the service of capitalist powers?

Stephen Graham, War and the city:

A hidden archipelago of mini-cities is now being constructed across the US sunbelt, presenting a jarring contrast to the surrounding strip-mall suburbia; other Third World cityscapes are rising out of the deserts of Kuwait and Israel, the downs of Southern England, the plains of Germany and the islands of Singapore. [...] In a mirror-image reversal of the more familiar global marketing contests in which cities parade their gentrification, cultural planning and boosterism, here the marks of success are decay and an architecture of collapse. Col. James Cashwell, a US squadron commander, reported after an exercise in an urban-warfare training city at George Air Force base in California that ‘the advantage of the base is that it is ugly, torn up, all the windows are broken [and trees] have fallen down in the street. It’s perfect for the replication of a war-torn city.’ [...] The ‘military–industrial–entertainment–media complex’ has played a central role in naturalizing the idea that American and allied forces should be pitched in battle against the inhabitants of Arab and Third World cities. The two most popular video game franchises in 2005 were Full Spectrum Warrior and America’s Army, developed respectively by the US Marines and the Army. Both games centre overwhelmingly on the task of occupying stylized Arab cities. Their immersive simulations work powerfully to equate these environments with ‘terrorism’ and to stress that they need ‘pacification’ or ‘cleansing’ by military means.

Let us remember today Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first female priest to be ordained in the Anglican Communion, who was born 100 years ago this day.

Sorry it’s taken so long to come up with part 2 of my response. Many forces have conspired against me to ensure that I didn’t finish, among them the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech.

To pick up on point I made in part 1, it takes putting ourselves in the picture (in much the same way that as Christians we must remind ourselves that we are complicit in Jesus’ suffering and death) in order for the violence in the Abu Ghraib photos to strike us as worth our regard (which, for those of who have suggested that I either naively or willfully snubbed postmodernity in my book, is exactly the problem I’m trying to warn against, considering we live in an image-based culture—call it postmodern, if you like—wherein the tendency is for images to serve only as references to other images, not to any actual event).

But to suggest, as Mike Ciul does, that I am on a quest for shame illustrates, to me, the truly troubling (postmodern?) predicament we find ourselves in. This is where I actually think using the term Postmodern is useful, as a pejorative, an ignominious label. It now seems fitting to evoke the set of larger social/cultural/economic/political circumstances that have brought us to this moment, because it surely takes a combination of powerful systemic forces ordering our lives and perceptions to bring us to the point where we distrust our conscience.
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An e-mail exchange:

Mike: I love this city, I gotta say.

Adam: I gotta say it does not surprise me that you’ve settled in a city that is years from a gentrification bubble. Any chump can talk about how much they love, say, Savannah or Santa Fe, but it takes a Mike Benedetti to love Worcester.

Teresian Carmelites win land battle!
This story has everything I love—Roman Catholicism, contemplative prayer, a $15 billion corporate villain, renewable energy, the works of mercy, and cable access TV. WCCA has the scoop.

Olympia CW closing?
Maybe so. When I visited them in 2003, the people doing the day-to-day work were short-time volunteers, with a non-profit corporation providing continuity. Most Catholic Worker communities don’t start that way, but several of them have ended up like that. If I get my act together, I’ll phone Olympia and find out what the story is.

Ukes at the Ship Room
This Saturday night: cheap beer and tiny guitars.