In this first piece, “You Say You Want a Devolution,” the main crux is that in the last twenty years, we have remained in a stagnant state of cultural development. “In the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so feels like an end of cultural history.” Kurt Andersen points to our nostalgic gaze towards the past, and the way our architecture and automobiles have remained looking mostly the same since 1991. We also dress nearly the same. Hip-hop, the last genuinely new form of music, makes an unapologetic use of old music through sampling. Fine art, which recognizably depicted people for every century before the 20th, is back to respectably representing human forms again. “It’s the rare ‘new’ cultural artifact that dosen’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes,” he writes. “In our Ben There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good.” There are two major reasons, he argues, for this stagnated cultural state:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.

…The other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. It blue jeans become unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

He goes on to ponder what this cultural moment–frozen mostly for the last 20 years–means for western civilizations as a whole, for their existence and sustainability in the future. I am not convinced it spells anything like the end for the West. But, he has a compelling overall theory, and when you consider the photographs and comparisons through the years of our cultural changes–buildings, clothing, cars–you see he is absolutely spot-on.

Illustration by James Taylor, accompanying the piece in Vanity Fair

I ear-marked the article and set the magazine in my current pile, and excitedly picked up Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which features, for 2011, The Protestor as the Person of the Year. Absolutely the right call–that’s the only “Person” we could choose to represent this amazing, tumultuous year.

And wouldn’t you know, the lead article begins its discussion, its explanation of this 2011, with the exact same Fukuyama theory, explained in The End of History, this “end” theoretically beginning around 1990. Then, only as I went to write about both of these articles and t he impact they’ve had on me as I reflect back over this year and its events, did I realize both are written by the same man, Kurt Andersen. Of course, that explains the similar thought process, and the similar sources of influence as Andersen himself was reflecting back over the year 2011.

The Time article has a more optimistic overture, even while explaining that there is no saying where the future will lead, after this year of tumult and protesting, and voices exploding over the things wrong with the world, all over the world. He points out several things that never occurred to me, things that make 2011 distinct from any other year in the last twenty, since the theoretical “end of history,” and that make it distinct from any other year since 1968, and–he argues–even farther back in history.

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strcitly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protestors were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news.–vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

Then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay… The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows–obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of calvary to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

It is stunning that I had never thought of this before, because in my history classes and even in simple living in this world, I have often thought of the protests of old as exactly that, as relics of eras gone past, a people, a group, a generation more connected, more concerned, and more committed to bringing change and making a difference than anything my generation could or would ever see. It seemed complacency had replaced this spirit of fighting, caring, standing up against The Man.

And then 2011 came out of nowhere. Spontaneous protests, beginning with a fruit vendor in Tunisia last December, and his death on January 4, 2011, snowballed around the globe, North Africa and the Middle East, in Europe, Asia, North America. But, historically, it was right on time:

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989–but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968–but more consequential because more protestors have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a counterculture pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then–within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses)–inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as huge peaceful demonstrations of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in the unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

That’s an extraordinary paragraph to consider. How 2011 is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many dozens of years–arguably since 1848! Also, I finally had to look up the root of the word zeitgeist, as too many intellectuals and writers have been brandishing that thing around, and it means, “the spirit of the day.” In fact, 2011 has a very distinct spirit, changing the course of what all the years to follow might hold.

Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Mohamed, the street vendor who set fire to himself after being fed up with corruption among city officials, last December, in Tunisia

I think what Andersen has done best, with both of these pieces in separate magazines, has been to show how we are simultaneously experiencing everything the same and nothing the same. And for some reason, this contradiction makes perfect sense. Reading these two articles almost back-to-back (absolutely unintentionally), one reads as a cautionary tale of a western culture gone a bit stale, the other as a means by which to rediscover ourselves, our values, and what is important in this life. And this year has been the perfect one in which to discover both these truths about ourselves, and to seek to bring them together harmoniously, using them for renewal, reaction, redemption, reward in years to come.

“Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years he was in power, as Saporito points out in his piece on the Chinese middle class, a spending class that precariously faces what could wind up saving the global economy–or busting it even further.

What China is planning is a shift away from export-based industry to a consumer-spending based system, but it will not be easy and there are plenty of potential hiccups involved in fundamentally shifting an economy of 1.7 billion people. But the middle class of that country, which they are projecting to be 70 percent of the population by 2020, could be the saviors of the global economic structure; they have immense capacity for spending, a huge group like that.

Western- and Chinese-based companies combine to create the giant metropoles that dot China. This is downtown Zhengzhou, whose population was 8 million in 2007.

Companies have known for years that the developing world was an important place for them to seek new markets for their goods. Couple that with a recession across the West and other developed nations, and you see a kind of exodus now, towards those booming, growing, expansive markets–the new consumers who have their eyes on fancy goods. Gap, the American jeans company, is closing twenty percent of its U.S. stores and tripling the number it has in China.

Saporito’s most memorable bit:

If successful, the shift to consumer spending will take a good chunk of the weight of the global economy off the shoulders of American consumers and make China a gotta-be-there market for everything from video games to surgical tools to potato chips. “This generation, these strivers, they will be the saviors of the global economy,” says Tim Minges, chairman of the greater China region for PepsiCo, which is pouring billions into China in anticipation of that growth. “I really do think the Chinese middle class will be like the U.S. baby boomers.”

I, for one, am putting my faith in this Chinese middle class, as the new version of the U.S.’s baby boomers, to save us all.

Shopping with other study abroad girls at an 8-story mall in Shanghai. (We were excited because they actually took credit/debit cards in Shanghai.)

A week or so ago he took on Fox News’s claims of “class warfare,” in response to Warren Buffet’s claims that the “super-rich” are “coddled” with their low levels of taxes. Stewart’s response is fantastic, hilarious, and with many underlying nuggets of truth. “All we have to do to raise $700 billion is cut 700,000 NPRs. It’s almost too easy!” Stewart joked.

Watch both parts, I swear you won’t be disappointed.

Part 2:

I decided that if I were to produce a pair of jeans, start to finish, I would charge the prospective buyer $2,000, at least. Obviously, I should not go into the jean-making-or-selling business. But it was a stark reminder that there are plenty of women–and also men and children–whose days are defined by pumping out pair after pair to sell to hungry consumers around the world for amazingly low prices, considering the labor. I cannot tell you how many times, during my years in mall retail sales associateship, I heard parents complain about the cost of jeans. They were especially mad when the jeans  were bleach-washed and “destroyed” (lots of holes and patches, in other words), as they could not believe they were paying more money for something that has been ripped up. As someone who has sat at home and pulled denim threads out of jeans until my fingers bled to get the same look in DIY form, I often held back from pointing out the obvious to them: someone has put many hours of their life into creating this pair of runway-ready jeans for you or your teenager. If you want, buy the regular pair for a whole $20 less, and take them home and try to do it yourself.

There are no new revelations to be had in what I am saying. Sweatshops and the low wages of garment industry workers have been well-publicized over the last twenty years or so, and I do not pretend to have some answer. As long as people need clothes to wear, there will be this problem in the world. But the important thing to remember is that it was not so long ago when the women of the United States were the ones subjected to the long hours, low pay, and back-breaking conditions. It is part of the phenomena of developing nations, that a generation will work very hard in factories to provide better lives for their children, the whole theory being that they can eventually move up a notch in the world. One of the most important lessons about places like Lowell, Massachusetts, which was defined by its industrial factories and garment producers in the nineteenth century, is that those conditions, the ones we thank our grandparents for improving for us–have not disappeared. They have simply relocated. Another group of people carries the burden today, producing clothing for the masses.

Earlier this semester, we read The Lowell Experiment in one of my classes, in which ethnographer Cathy Stanton examines the relationship between historians, a post-industrial city, and the National Park that the city is today. Lowell is still a real, inhabited city, but it is also a historical subject, and a place in the American industrial past that serves as a ground for social scientists to really examine many aspects of the course of American history over the last couple hundred years. What Stanton does the best is remind us that historians do not exist in a vacuum, but are, just by going to a place and trying to learn about it, affecting the results they will find. The relationship a historian has to her subject cannot be entirely removed from the results she will present to her peers and community.

And the other key thing Stanton brings home is that Lowell’s history cannot exist one its own, either. People who visit the city-slash-national-park have to be confronted with the notion that these factories, just because they are no longer booming here, does not mean they are gone, that we have cured the world of the plight of the factory worker. She points out one poignant moment on a tour she was on, when the tour guide strayed from his script for a moment and did what Stanton had concluded had not been happening in this place: he connected past and present. His statement:

I want to say, this machine isn’t just history. When we built this historical park we had to travel around the world to buy looms. Looms like this are operating as we speak somewhere around the world. It’s kind of neat to think about that. And there’s no right or wrong answer, there’s no easy answer to it, but we can go to Wal-Mart or A.J. Wright or any store, really, and buy really cheap clothing. And what’s the alternative? Paying a lot for your clothes? We all work, we all try and and pay the best we can for our cloth. But the reason we can get cheap cloth is because someone around the world is working on these looms, and looms not unlike what we have today. A few years ago, Kathy Lee Gifford was in trouble for using child labor on machines just like this. So it’s just something to think about.

One other thing I like to sort of think about is the word “labor.” It means “to suffer” in Latin. And when you think about the suffering that goes into making cloth, back in history and even to the present day, it’s just something to think about. We wear the clothes, sometimes we don’t think especially how hard the person who built or made the clothes worked to produce that. And all that labor, all the suffering that went into building this city, and the results, both good and bad. Just think about that a little bit. And I’ll be talking about more of the positive consequences on the way back. But on a hot, sticky day, with this loud machine and the lint flying in the air, it’s pretty easy to picture how miserable it would be to work there. (p. 61)

Stanton says it was a stunning moment, where suddenly each person on the tour was confronted with “the phantom figure of the Malaysian or Pakistani mill girl who was laboring–suffering–so that we could buy a t-shirt for a small fraction of what it would have cost to produce in a developed country.”

The tour guide was obviously taking a risk, and chose his words wisely, speaking softly around the issue but offering no illusions about what he was referencing. And, the author reported, the other people on the tour, while a bit shaken, seemed to be able to handle it. “This is precisely the goal of progressive public history,” she says, “to seize such small opportunities and compound them into larger visions of the process we are all a part of.”

My own sewing quarters, where I am allowed the gift of being able to create what I want, as a hobby rather than a laborious job. I am truly grateful.

I was reminded of all of this not because I hemmed a pair of jeans–although that brought the message of labor and frustration home personally–I was reminded, really, by the remembrance, recently, of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, which 100 years ago went up in flames on a Saturday morning in March, killing more than 100 workers, mostly women and children, due to a shoddy fire escape and other unsafe conditions for its workers. Supervisors would lock their workers into the factory’s floors, on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the ten-story building, and so when the fire erupted, many people were left to jump out the windows–usually to their death. In 1911, in an industry of extremes that was subject to the whims of the fashion trends, work of this nature was often relegated to new immigrants seeking to improve their lives. Their average work weeks were 84 hours. These were the victims of the fire, one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. The tragedy of that day, which you can explore in a podcast and recreation of the morning here, reminds us again that such circumstances have not gone away–they have only gone beyond our national borders. It is a kind of labor many of us can only imagine.

It has not entirely left the United States, nor Lowell. Immigrants still hold those jobs, today.

The World’s Jason Margolis did a news story on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and its galvanization of the garment industry. (I heard it on Jeb Sharp’s How We Got Here history podcast.) He reports exactly the thing that the Lowell tour guide was imparting on his listening visitors, but in more specific way, and with direct connection to the conditions that existed in the Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.

“Effectively what we have done is exported our sweatshops and exported our factory fires,” said Robert Ross at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. And it’s as if the 1911 conditions had been lifted up by an evil hand and dropped into Bangladesh.”

According to the Bangladeshi government’s Fire Service and Civil Defense Department, 414 garment workers were killed in at least 213 factory fires between the years 2006 and 2009. Last year, 191 people were killed in Bangladesh in a reported 20 incidents, according to Ross’ research. Last December, a fire killed at least 25 people in a garment factory there.

“And the pattern is disturbingly uniform,” said Ross. “The shops are often in high rise buildings, just like the Triangle. The pattern is that an electrical fire starts, and then without adequate, or any fire escapes, without sprinkler systems, the workers surge to get out. And in factory after factory, the newspapers report locked gates and locked doors. It’s a horrific duplication of what we earlier experienced.”

Even while we may not have answers about these issues, it is important that we be aware, as we put on our clothes each morning, that simply because the factory is farther away does not mean the work has improved any in the last one hundred years. After my frustrating night last night, my hat goes off to all of them, in every factory corner of the world. I hope we can begin to change out outlooks and our consumer mindsets, or at least improve our awareness as a whole, so that we can move towards improvements in the lives of all garment industry workers, not just the ones in the United States.

If the east and west coasts lead the trends, then middle-America picks them up a few seasons later, from the mall or from any department store, in their homogeneous packages, and with the stores using the same marketing techniques in Boise, ID, Topeka, KS, and Charlotte, NC. One group of people decide what should be sold and how it should be marketed, and in an era when people are spending less time buying high-prices clothes while munching on Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites, this is an obviously outdated approach.

The jean wall at the end of the day during back-to-school season

Buy jeans, get a shirt half off!

Spend $50, get $10 off!

All shirts, jewelery, shoes (insert your product here) BUY ONE GET ONE HALF OFF!

In the retail world, that last one is an actual term, BOGO, which might sound nicer if it was actually “buy-one-get-one,” except that it usually means “buy-one-get-one-half-off.”

I was never a fool walking into the mall, but after three years working in that grinding place, you learn all the tricks. You’d think people would realize that they’re still spending more when they do the BOGO thing, and sometimes, if you are looking for two shirts or two necklaces, that can be handy. In most cases, people should more likely keep their wallet shut and bee-line it for the door– especially when managers are training their sales associates to get you to add on items to your purchase, apply for a credit card, and even track you down in the fitting room to suggest additional items you might like to go along with the lot you’ve already hauled in there. It is oft-repeated to associates that the customer is three times more likely to buy something once they’ve tried it on.

And an hour or two later, it's ready for another day of shoppers.

How refreshing, then, that some big-box department stores have finally admitted that maybe there is a better way to reach their nation-wide markets than by offering the same exhausted polo shirts and ripped jeans and bejeweled belts to everyone. From yesterday’s article in the New York Times:

After decades of acquiring, consolidating and centralizing, the department store chain is rediscovering — and financially exploiting — its multiple local roots, advancing a trend that is quickly being adopted by other retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Best Buy.

It is a lesson many companies overlooked in the last 30 years as they rolled smaller stores into huge national brands, and headquarters mandated what the outlets in Biloxi or Boise should sell.

But years of economic turmoil for the retail industry have helped refresh memories. While many national retailers continue to see sales declines in a sour economy, Macy’s says its first full year of “going local” has helped increase sales significantly and “lifted the entire Macy’s performance,” according to its chairman and chief executive, Terry J. Lundgren.

Hallelujah, someone is paying attention to the markets. It does retailers no good anymore to continue to push from above the same tired tactics that were in place before the recession of circa 2008. Instead of desperately reaching with ever-greater numbers of promotions to try to get that same product out the door, perhaps the product must be changed, be more in tune with the market. People want to buy things that are specific to their area–like clothing based on school colors, and climate-appropriate jackets, for example–and money will always be spent on things like that.

In the case of these Macy’s stores, the article points specifically to the Cumberland Mall in Atlanta, and their expansion in the last year of their hat department, whose sales have doubled accordingly, as they sought to give their southern and urban market what it wants.

“We have research information, and we think about household income and population size, but I think it’s much more accurate to have people living in the marketplace tell you, ‘This is who’s shopping in my store,’ ” Mr. Lundgren said.

I always thought it was silly to carry the same coats and sweaters at the Georgia September floorset switch as in the Ohio season switch, when it’s still so hot out; accordingly, people in Cincinnati are not looking for bathing suits in January (nor, really, are Atlantans, but even less so for the mid-westerners). Yet this is taking the whole approach to the American market to a new level of regional consideration, for the better. There are plenty of arguments out there for “going local” for environmental reasons; how about going local for the sake of making a bigger buck on your market? When you have a strong East Asian community, offer more extra smalls; when you have a large Indian clientele, tweak your jewelry spread to include more gold items, less silver.

From the same article:

“In prior years, with the recession, it became all about cost-cutting no matter what,” said Esteban Bowles, a retail consultant with A. T. Kearney. “Now companies are seeing the light and looking for the rebound.”

If my years folding clothes at the mall taught me anything, it was that the whole bottom-line, make-every-last-dollar-we-can mindset is just as prevalent as you hear, and those retailers, they’re all fighting–viciously–to win those economically wounded customers from each other. What hurts the most for sales associates is that they get grief, and pressure, from their managers, who get it from their regional managers, who get it from district- and national-level bosses. Everyone is trying to illustrate that they have what it takes to make money in retail, but maybe they need to start all over with their definitions of “retail.” People will always need to buy things that they need and that appeal to them. Now, start from there.

Fruit sellers plop happily outside the entrance to Yangzhou University, Yanzgzhou, China (2007). Microfinancing companies loan money to people who are otherwise unable to borrow from typical lenders, opening up their realm of economic endeavors and allowing local artisans the ability to expand their businesses.

Jacqueline Novogratz learned this the hard way. Walking in to the African Development Bank for her first day on the job in Côte d’Ivoire in 1986, she received stony glares from African women in immensely colorful dress, and felt the part of an uptight librarian in her skirt-and-blouse combo and glasses. “I hadn’t expected to encounter poisoning and voodoo among women bankers in Africa,” she says, but after a week or two, that is exactly what was faced her. As most would, when she took a job with a development company in Africa, she had been imagining something more along the lines of sitting on the ground with women in a rural village; instead, she was facing somewhat powerful and relatively wealthy women who hated what she represented: white people from the economic “North” (read: developed world), who sat in their offices thousands of miles away and wrote up plans for improving the African continent while sipping $4 lattes.

Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, wrote about her experiences as a banker out to make a difference in her memoir The Blue Sweater.

Long story short, Novogratz is today the CEO of Acumen Fund, which has successfully invested in local businesswomen in the form of microloans that have proven effective ways of empowering those who cannot start businesses or get loans the traditional way. She emphasizes loans instead of donations, proving to be a more sustainable approach, one which invests in the skills and integrity of real merchants and artisans in a bottom-up way. She has also spoken at TED about her real belief that poverty can be abolished, her determination founded not in naive idealism but in experienced optimism and creative thinking. She also wrote a book, The Blue Sweater, chronicling how it all happened. (Listen to the amazing story of her beloved Blue Sweater, and what it taught her about the world.)

I have not finished reading the book yet, but one of the most striking things I’ve discovered is how harshly the world can hit that little white girl with a big heart and some education, who wants to make a difference and see the world while she’s at it. Novogratz spent three days writhing on the bathroom floor after a reception she’d attended with the women of her development banking office, unable to drink even water; whether this was a coincidental illness or a moderate dose of poison, the event was ominous and painful. And the world is ominous and painful, especially for poverty-stricken women in villages and cities around the world, but also for little white girls who venture out into it.

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale, 2009)

I crack so easily over my own trials and am such an emotional person when I’m talking about things I’m passionate about, I honestly think I would have broke down crying in front of those intimidating, strong, hardened, female African bankers. What things they have faced that I’ve never had to face myself! And then, even if I began to make progress with a new job in a new country, as Novogratz did, the work is still accompnaied by doubts and tribulations aplenty, and you go about witnessing hardships while struggling against the established status quo. This difficulty intimidates me to my core. The world of changing the world is scary, messy, disheartening business. But Novogratz never gave up hope; for it is also rewarding, enlightening, and after everything, beneficial to the people who need it the most– if you’ve got a smart plan. And great compassion. And, really, if you’re tough enough. I hope that if such an opportunity or chance position comes my way, I’m brave enough–and also crazy enough–to take it.