I've Been Lifted

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”-- Thomas More, Utopia

Watched two crows fighting over a coffee-cup-lid in the alley yesterday.  Fascinating contest consisting mostly of feint, parry, retreat, repeat.  No noise, which surprised me not a little.  One crow would collect the inverted lid from the ground, drop it to answer a challenge and then the other would rush forward to grab the thing where it fell.  Went on for some time.  At one point, the smaller of the two birds even managed to fly roughly three feet from the ground with the prize in his beak before dropping it.  All this over what appeared to be an empty coffee-cup-lid.  Car came down the alley at last and ended the duel.  The lid was abandoned.  Perhaps it was all just sport, that duel over nothing much.

I rather love living in a city with more birds than most, and I've become specially fond of our crows.  We have a large population, and supposedly ravens as well, though I don't know that I've ever actually seen one of those.  From my own observation I would say the crows are the kings of the city streets.  I've seen them chase off everything from the usual finches and pigeons to seagulls easily twice their size, though I did once watch a seagull kick a crow's ass in the parking lot I use for work.  Tough little customers nonetheless, crows.  They've a bad reputation traditionally; as thieves and harbingers of death and bad luck.  Nonsense of course, except for the thievery.  Once saw a crow snatch a half-eaten sandwich from the lap of a dozing old rummy. "Opportunity makes a thief." as Francis Bacon said.

Watching the crows always put me in mind of that Ted Hughes poem about the begats, "Who begat Never / Never, Never, Never / Who begat Crow", etc., and of Arthur Rackham's crows, from his illustrations of Peter Pan, I think it was, among other things.  Both those boys liked crows too, each in his way.

I am reliably informed by a member of our Security crew at the bookstore where I work that a shoplifter was apprehended stuffing a copy on my calendar, among other things, into her backpack.  That doesn't happen every day.  Pray, don't misunderstand me, the shoplifters are quite regular in their work, but then so is the Security crew.  But why would someone risking jail-time just to steal one of my calendars?!  Hardly hardened criminals, the girls Security caught that day -- there were two, though only the one felt the need of my 2016 Calendar of Literary Caricatures.  Between them, as I understand it, they'd taken all sorts of art supplies, two hardcover novels, my calendar and various odds and ends.  Wouldn't seem likely then that they came in looking to boost my calendar specifically.  Still, it caught somebody's eye.

On reflection I suppose I'm... flattered?

Copies of Serial Doodler and my other little efforts have gone missing from the bookstore before.  Presumably those were lifted as well, if not simply lost one way or another.  Humble as my efforts have been, at least they were books.  This though would be the first time a thief was actually busted with one of my calendars in her bag.

Why steal such a thing?  Most of our regular shoplifters are rather hapless young fools, often with money enough in their pockets to pay for the things they've stolen.  These junior Arsène Lupins tend to take small items, pens and candy-bars and the like, anything that can be slipped unobtrusively into a backpack or coat-pocket. When caught, they cry.  The rest, if not quite professionals, are certainly harder types; homeless junkies and sneak-thieves rather than kleptos or delinquent thrill-seekers.  Such a crew tends to take more expensive items: sports jerseys and art books, fountain-pens, and pricey chotskies from the Gift Shop; things that might be sold, in other words.  What anyone might realize from such trade must be negligible, but if one were hungry enough, for either food or a fix, there is an obvious if inadequate logic to the crime.  Based on what I was told of what my shoplifter took, I'd guess she was nearer to being one of the former type than the latter.  Calendars, even more commercially produced ones, have no more resale value than the colored pencils she also stole, in fact, less.

I don't flatter myself that there's much traffic in blackmarket caricatures.

The motives of my admirer and her companion in crime don't actually matter as they were duly arrested and presumably charged with petty larceny.  The bookstore does not take these things lightly.  Rightly so.

That said, I rather like the idea of these particular crows being true, if impecunious aesthetes.  I don't know the titles of the books they took, but one rather hopes these might have been nice editions of Huysmans' Le Bas and maybe a leatherbound copy of The Portrait of Dorian Gray.  The art-pencils and the rest were meant to aid the creation of some startling new work of genius, and my little black and white calendar was meant to find pride of place on their garret-wall, to inspire them.

I suspect however that it was just the coffee-cup-lid one of them found inexplicably attractive all of a sudden.

Birdbrains anyway, poor things.

Bad Sign

A friend posted this to me on social media.  I've seen it elsewhere, of course, if never in such fancy calligraphy before. To put it plain again, it reads:

"If you must steal books steal from a richly stock'd Corporate Bookstore."

Oh, please.

First, it's that word, "must" that just does my head in.  Who exactly, in a country with the largest system of public libraries in the history of the world "must" steal books?!  Jean Valjean stole from necessity.  Bread.  He stole bread.  He stole to feed his widowed sister and her seven children, remember?  Hunger and the suffering of others are compelling reasons to steal.  (And keep in mind, it didn't really work out all that great for him.  The consequences of his theft were monumental, measured in plot or pages, and the suffering?  Prisoner 24601.  Chapter One, Book One.  Need I go on?)  Nobody has to steal a book in this country.  Nobody.

Then there's the second fallacy in this argument, nearly as bad as the first.  The "richly stock'd Corporate Bookstore" is very much a thing of the past, but even when Borders and Barnes and Noble were still going concerns, the idea that the harm done by shoplifting was to their corporate bosses was ridiculous.  Those losses were written off, it's true, but not by the managers and staff, the honest booksellers who worked for low wages and who were made to suffer for not controlling their inventory.  Trust me, the consequences were felt by the very people least able to afford them.

So, where does this come from, this persistent lie that somehow petty theft can be justified by politics?  And just why does it still exercise me so?

When I was young, I read Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy.  I called myself an Anarchist, now and then.  True, I never "liberated" books as a contribution to the coming Revolution, but I understand the urge to strike a blow here and there.  And when AIDS came along and defined my generation, I marched with the rest.  I even got arrested a couple of times.  (I was not a very committed activist though.  I once begged a policeman to let me go pee after I'd been arrested, promising I would come straight back and go to jail with the rest.  He cut my zip-tie and told me "don't come back," and I didn't.)  Still, I marched against Apartheid, and for a woman's right to choose.  I was there when we shut down the Capital in Sacramento once, and the Golden Gate Bridge.  I was there when we surrounded a drug company's headquarters because they wouldn't sell AZT at a reasonable price.  I blocked traffic.  I shouted "The Whole World Is Watching" and knocked over police-barriers when the cops were beating Delores Huerta.  I marched on Washington.  I didn't actually join much, or organize anything.  I put out the chairs a couple of times for meetings at the Women's Building.  I was an "emotional support" volunteer, briefly, for the Shanti Project.  I learned that I hated consensus building, cold-calls and sharing.

So maybe I'm not the best example.  Still, I was there, kinda.

Fight the power.

I also learned that the idiots who broke out the windows at the Wendy's on Market Street every single time we went marching by inconvenienced no one but the developmentally disabled employee who invariably came out to sweep up the glass.  I learned that the kids in Berkley who invariably tried to turn over the cop cars were always going straight back to their fully-paid dorm-rooms and supper on a meal-plan at the cafeteria after.

Working in bookstores nearly my whole adult life, I've learned that for every street kid who shoplifts to get a fix or a meal, there are two shoplifters who work as part of an organized gang and three more who steal art supplies or textbooks with the money to buy these things in their pockets --money from their parents who can afford it.  It's that last sorry lot who most often subscribe to the silly sentiment expressed in the sign above -- at least until Security catches them.  They always cry when they're busted.  They're always more afraid of what Dad will say, and how this might affect their transcript than of actually getting arrested.  None of them has ever expressed, in my hearing anyway, how it will all be worked out, come the Revolution.  It seems there are no committed revolutionaries ever handcuffed to the bench in the Security office.

It's a dodge, plain and simple, a way to avoid doing anything meaningful by assigning meaning to something done for the thrill of being bad, or sounding cool.  Sentimental anarchism of this kind has all the political veracity of "compassionate conservatism," or 'market communism."  It's just another way of being dishonest without feeling so bad about it.

So.  If anyone under twenty-five should ever happen across these words, and the mood should come upon you to steal a book from the independent bookstore where I work, should you want in this way to stick it to the Man, or whatever the phrase is nowadays, just come find me.  I'm almost always right there, on the sales floor.  Easy to spot: the little fat man with the big white beard.  Just stop by and say "hi."  We can talk about Slovoj Zizek and I'll tell you about the time we scared the Secretary of the Interior so bad he refused to get out of his armored car.  I can recommend a great book by Errico Malatesta.

And, hell, kid, I'll buy you the fucking book.

Just don't be such a jerk.