Author: Aaron Weber

I just started reading Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton. It’s about how, given the possibility of rising above our stations, we suffer more greatly from jealousy. Serfs were not jealous of nobles, they accepted their miserable lives as part of nature’s way. Once people figured out that wasn’t so, they became fiercely unhappy with their lot, and improved it, by revolution if necessary.

There are two ways to remedy anxiety about your standing: achieve greatness (this is impossible– no matter how great you are, there is still anxiety) or give up (this is either defeatism or buddhism, depending on your point of view). De Botton quotes William James: “How pleasant is the day when we give up trying to be young or slender.”

The specifics of the desired greatness vary from person to person. For example, Pablo Escobar always wanted to be great, by which he meant, he wanted to be popular, he wanted to be admired, he wanted a big house and a fancy car and a big TV and teenage hookers. He had all those things for awhile, before he was hunted down and shot at close range, finally. The book Killing Pablo is an excellent and unbiased account of the hunt and eventual capture. What I like most about it is the way that the author chronicles the good things that Escobar did, as well as the bad, and the ways that the US and Colombian forces had to make compromises with their ethics to eventually capture him. The author doesn’t pass judgement on anyone involved, and doesn’t need to, because the story holds up on its own as a tale of suspense and investigation, driven by Pablo Escobar’s status anxiety– and that of his customers in the US.

Listen, O thou exceedingly foolish virgin, for you will beget difficult teenagers!

You thought Fast Food Nation was a stinging indictment of US food practice, and it was. It also had information about how to improve food safety, worker health, and general quality of life.

Against the Grain author Richard Manning is apparently opposed to agriculture. Not even agriculture as practiced in the US by giant combines with tons of pesticides and petroleum fertilizers, mind you. He’s more or less opposed to agriculture, which despite the various problems he describes with it, is still the foundation of global society.

Yes, the particular fertilizers used by US agribusiness are ruining our waterways, and yes, the US agricultural subsidy system is screwed up beyond belief. Let’s reform them. Let’s eat organic. Let’s eat low on the food chain, low on the processing scale, be aware of the petroleum in our breakfast cereal. But come on– you’re attacking agriculture and describing it as the bane of global existence? Gimme a break. You can tell he’s on thin ice when he begins romanticizing the hunter-gatherers and talks about how important it is to hunt your own elk. Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that.