Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power by Mark Shapiro (Chelsea Green, 2008)

At Google Book Search | excerpt at PBS | publisher’s page

From the publisher:

Thanks to the successful lobbying efforts of the U.S. chemical industry, Americans are being exposed to an array of environmental and health hazards—including rising rates of infertility, endocrine system disruptions, neurological disorders, and cancer—from which many others around the world are being protected.

In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power, award-winning investigative journalist Mark Schapiro reveals how products on American shelves are increasingly being linked with serious health hazards—hazards, like Bisphenol A (BPA) and plastic softening phthalates, that the European Union is leading the rest of the world in legislating out of existence.

Schapiro takes the reader inside the global power shift that has gone almost wholly unreported in the United States, exposing not only the health and environmental consequences of this shift, but its implications for the American economy. He demonstrates how the environmental progress underway in Europe is prompting innovation and enabling their firms to beat American companies in the global competition for markets—markets that are becoming increasingly sensitive to environmental and health concerns.

As the Obama administration considers options for reform, Schapiro also demonstrates that what’s already happening in the world’s largest single market may suggest a route out of America’s long-lasting, and dangerous, status quo.

See also: What’s In This Stuff?: The Hidden Toxins in Everyday Products - and What You Can Do About Them

An Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008)

From the book’s website:

An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. The map is inherently political– and the contributions to this book wear their politics on their sleeves.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. The maps and essays in this book provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places. These new perceptions of the world are the prerequisites of social change.

Oh, this is just the thing to brighten my day. The Boston Phoenix has created short MP3s of the crucial bits from Obama’s reading of his autobiography. Hear the President of the US say: “You know that guy ain’t shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker ain’t got nothing on me.” “There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.” “You ain’t my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!”

In his bestselling autobiography, Dreams From My Father, President Obama introduces us to his high school friend, “Ray,” who, like him, is bi-racial. Who, also like him, is casting about to find his place in the world. But, who, unlike him, has a potty mouth that would make a sailor blush.

Best of all? When reading the audiobook version of his bio, Obama does impressions of Ray’s manner of speech. Swear words and all. It’s fucking awesome.

{Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog}

Oh, and here’s some YouTubeage of these bits:

I recently posted an item about Penguin Classics bringing out an edition of Steal This Book this summer. That reminded me of something I posted on my site The Memory Hole several years ago, regarding the lost sequel to Steal This Book:

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In one of Hoffman’s last interviews (published in Pranks! from RE/Search Publications (1987)), Andrea Juno asked him: “Have you ever considered writing a sequel to Steal This Book?” He replied:

I did–it was 500 pages long. I submitted it to a publisher who went bankrupt and lost it–the only copy. I was totally heartbroken because it was the definitive work on counterfeiting, jewel smuggling–you name it. It’s what people think Steal This Book is.

In the introduction to Steal This Book, Hoffman gave some hints about what else could’ve been in the lost sequel:

Watch for a special edition called Steal This White House, complete with blueprints of underground passages, methods of jamming the communications network, and a detailed map of the celebrated room where according to Tricia Nixon, “Daddy loves to listen to Mantovanni records, turn up the air conditioner full blast, sit by the fireplace, gaze out the window to the Washington Monument and meditate on those difficult problems that face all the peoples of this world.”

Ron Rosenbaum (The Secret Parts of Fortune, Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars) is working on a book about “the new face of nuclear warfare,” which is cause for excitement.  In his Slate column, he writes about the deeply hidden nuclear “Letter of Last Resort”:

At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail reports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career … and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided.”

The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub’s missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister’s posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter.

The old-fashioned, pen-and-ink-on-paper quality of it all (quill pen, perhaps?) somehow makes the system seem like it emanated from a 19^th-century madhouse out of Wilkie Collins. Which makes it even more profoundly shocking that the system is still in place.

Rosenbaum also gives us a glimpse of his research for the book:

In 1997, the U.S. Navy discovered that there was a “backdoor” electronic entrance to the nuclear missile submarine launch control system, according to Bruce Blair, head of the World Security Institute, a Washington think tank. Blair told me the “backdoor” entrance would have allowed a diabolically ingenious hacker to insert a launch order into the system.

When he worked in Colorado College’s library, Zac Frank found Elizabeth Cheney’s 1988 senior thesis in the trash bin. For her bachelor’s in poli-sci, Dick Cheney’s elder daughter had written “The Evolution of Presidential War Powers.” Frank gives us the scoop:

The 125-page treatise argued that, constitutionally and historically, presidents have virtually unchecked powers in war. Thirteen years before her father became vice president, she had symbolically authored the first legal memorandum of the Bush administration, laying out the same arguments that would eventually justify Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, and, broadly, the unitary theory of the executive that shaped the Bush presidency.

…

Time and again, Cheney contends that in times of war, presidents since Washington have justifiably redefined their authority to preserve the country, and she is scornful of any who challenge that authority. As Congress challenged presidential authority toward the end of Vietnam, she casts them as scapegoating the executive. “As public support dwindled so did congressional willingness to accept responsibility,” she writes, “Congress set about to blame the only two men who couldn’t escape responsibility.” For someone who has vested so much faith in executive wisdom, she is surprisingly unwilling to hold it accountable.

Penguin Classics is going to publish Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book in June.

Yes, Penguin Classics, home of Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville.

Hey, I’m tickled pink about this. I’m all for expanding the canon with classic radical and outsider works. (My very first published writings (book reviews for Factsheet Five) and my first two books (containing over 2,000 capsule book reviews) were all about promoting radical, subversive, and small-press books.)

Then again, this always leads to the same dilemma: When the mainstream embraces/commodifies something radical, is it really radical anymore? Or has it been defanged?

Then again again, and this is a point I make on a regular basis, classic literature is a lot more radical than our culture thinks it is. So many of the masterworks of literature caused a furor when they were first published - hated by the literary establishment of the time, attacked by the religious, and/or prosecuted by the state. We forget this because our culture views the canon as boring fossils - and this is because of the crummy way almost all of us were introduced to literature - as a school subject, with no bearing on the real world, filled with details to memorize and be tested on.

You could make the argument that age has made Steal This Book toothless, a quaint relic of late Counterculture, but I’m not so sure. The general idea - giving specific instructions for beating or blowing up the system, fighting in the streets, armed revolution, etc.  - is still radical, even though - with the rise of the Net - it’s not exactly hard to come by anymore. Yes, much of Hoffman’s information is hopelessly dated (”On the West Side, there’s a poet named Delworth at 125 Sullivan St. that houses kids if he’s got room.”), but quite a bit of it still holds.  And squatting, shoplifting, gas-syphoning, and Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs remain illegal. Plus, repeatedly referring to cops as “pigs” is still highly frowned upon.

It’s funny what time and success will do, considering that Penguin - like all the other corporate publishers, and many independents - rejected Steal This Book when Hoffman was originally trying to get it published in 1970-1. He ended up self-publishing it under the imprint Pirate Editions, and it became a surprise New York Times bestseller, prompting him to say: “It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller’s List.” I wonder what he’d say about this. “It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up enshrined as canonical literature.”

In other words, never mind what Homer, Dante, and Woolf would think about Hoffman joining their ranks - what would Hoffman think about it?

[Steal This Book is available in its entirety here.]

“I don’t believe in capital punishment. But I’d travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged.”

– Sydney Schanberg

Sydney Schanberg, you’ll recall, is the Pulitzer-winning reporter whose experiences in Cambodia, covering the bombing of the country and the rise of the Khmer Rouge for the New York Times, were turned into the film The Killing Fields.

If you’re unsure why Kissinger deserves the gallows, read “The Case Against Henry Kissinger” [part 1, part 2] by Christopher Hitchens, or the book based on these articles, The Trial of Henry Kissinger [excerpts here]. Or at least watch The Trials of Henry Kissinger [Google video].

Schanberg’s quote was recently revealed in All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page [book site] by Jerelle Kraus, who was art director of the op-ed page for 13 years. She briefly mentions that Schanberg gave his thoughts on Kissinger during a lunch at Sardi’s. (Besides the op-ed page’s greatest hits and lots of juicy behind-the-scenes info, this heavily illustrated book includes artwork that was rejected by or altered at the insistence of the Times‘ editors.)