Beginning today, I am going on a holiday break until January 3, 2023. Until then, be safe and happy, eat everything you want, and love the people you are with. Also: please accept my gratitude for another year of your support—whether you read for free or are a paying subscriber—for my work on Political Junkie. It means the world to me.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve (Google tells me the official name for this day is “Christmas Eve Eve”), and last-minute present buying is proceeding apace. You could hardly get into my local bookstore yesterday, which cheered me up enormously. And this afternoon, when I realized that I had disposed of (or mislaid) my pudding steamer in our recent New York City downsizing. I ran out to our local kitchen store to get another, and I am pleased to say that they were hopping too.
So, I hope that after two pandemic holiday seasons, where independent and small businesses grimly hung on in this small western Massachusetts town and some closed, this year will stabilize all the small shops many of us love.
Particularly book stores.
One of the odd things about Americans is that we say we love small businesses, but we don’t shop at them as much as we need to in order to support them. Despite emergency loans from the government, Covid-19 dealt a devastating blow to many small businesses: by November 2021, there were 37.5% fewer of them than there had been 22 months earlier. And while many of us learned that it was just as easy and fast to order a book from our local bookstore, the habit of buying impulsively from Amazon remained.
Small businesses are also vulnerable in an economy where big box stores, online shopping, and the desire for convenience and cheap goods predominate. According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, which drew its data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “18% of small businesses fail within their first year, while 50% fail after five years and approximately 65% by their tenth year in business.” Why? Because they run out of money. Some are probably undercapitalized, while others don’t get the foot traffic they need to pay the rent and turn whatever profit the owner needs to live on.
All of these factors have hit bookstores hard. The suburbs where I grew up, and the New York City I moved to in 1980 as a young college graduate, were filled with bookstores, most of which have now been gone for twenty years. In New York City, stores I frequented weekly—the St. Mark’s Bookstore, the Biography Bookstore, teh University Press Bookstore, the Mystery Bookstore, and half a dozen others—are all gone. New York City used to have three bookstores devoted to gay and lesbian books below 14th street alone: there are now none. As recently as 2005, Harvard Square in Cambridge was filled with bookstores—now there are two.
The few independent bookstores that remain and all the big box booksellers do now carry LGBT books, but whether it is a neighborhood bookstore or a big box, only three to five shelves are devoted to queer authors. So today, finding LGBT work that the mainstream has not taken up is a significant challenge. In addition, because they can no longer browse rows of stacks filled with gay and lesbians books, younger readers will never find classic queer texts—Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, or Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance—on their own.
Bookstores are said to be on the rebound since online bookselling decimated them twenty years ago, although specialty stores like the ones I named above do not seem to be coming back any time soon. As of 2022, there are still only 2,506 in the United States, slightly below pre-pandemic levels. And they are clustered in particular neighborhoods: for example, two are a ten-minute walk from my home in Northampton, Massachusetts, three more are about a twenty-minute drive away, and one is around the corner from my apartment in New York.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Bookstores are cultural institutions, and while we can’t reverse e-commerce, it’s hard for people to use bookstores if they don’t exist. So, why can’t there be low-interest loans—city, state, or federal—to establish and support community bookstores? While federally-funded small business loans already exist, they must be repaid in seven years, a financial deadline that a bookstore—with its small profit margins—might be unable to meet.
But if we believed that bookstores were a foundation for an educated republic and that they belonged everywhere—not just Northampton and New York, but in the Mississippi Delta, small towns in the Mountain West, and the Central Valley in California—bookstores would be as necessary as hospitals and police stations. So why shouldn’t the government want Americans to have them?
Increasing the number of independent bookstores would mean small business loans that, over time, could be either interest-free or forgiven under certain conditions. Maybe that would mean establishing a bookstore on a Native American reservation or in Appalachia, where the bookseller made the space available for community events, as women’s, Marxist, and LGBT bookstores used to do. Maybe that would mean establishing a bookstore in Harlem devoted to Black literature and history, where the bookseller taught local youth the basics of how to run a business.
Let’s imagine the world we want to live in this holiday season. Let’s not assume that the world we love is gone forever but that it can return if we imagine politics expanding to include it.
Let’s imagine.
Bless you, and I will see you in the New Year.
Remember Paul Whelan:
I am very happy and relieved that basketball star Brittney Griner is home from her unjust detention in Russia. But she urges us not to forget about Paul Whelan, another American held in a Russian prison who the Putin government is still holding as a hostage. Griner has spoken about how meaningful it was to get letters, and urges us to write Whelan too. You can send a letter to: Paul N. Whelan, c/o American Citizen Services Unit, Consular Section, 5430 Moscow Place, Department of State, Washington, D.C., 20521-5430.
Winter break reading:
You can get your own .pdf copy of the January 6 Committee report here. Want to hold it in your hands? You can pre-order here.
Short Takes:
All Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) wants for Christmas is the Speaker’s gavel. But Santa may have other ideas. At Politico’s “Deep Dive” podcast, Virginia Republican Bob Goode (VA-05) explains why he and four other Republicans in the “Never Kevin” faction are holding out—and that they have another candidate in mind (as yet unnamed) in the event that they effectively block McCarthy. (December 23, 2022)
Remember when your Mom used to tell you to ignore the bullies on the playground? In a plea for sanity, Dan Drezner asks the media to stand down when a MAGAt does something juvenile. “Whatever one thinks of Boebert and Gaetz, they are elected representatives (though in the case of Boebert, just barely) who attended a speech and did not agree with the speaker,” Dan points out at his Substack, Drezner’s World. “They did not disrupt the event or try to engage in a heckler’s veto. They merely declined to stand up when everyone else did.” I endorse this sentiment. (December 23, 2020
You probably already saw this New York Times. But I wanted to highlight Jeremy Peters’ article about the Dominion Voting machine lawsuit against Fox News, in which he reports on testimony by Sean Hannity and others (including Tucker Carlson’s boss) that they repeatedly invited election deniers on their shows who they themselves believed were spewing falsehoods. It’s really stunning. “One lawyer for Dominion said that `not a single Fox witness’ so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network,” Peters writes. “And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to the Dominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford.” (December 21, 2022)
The awful thing about our alleged support for small businesses is that when we do try to help them out--say, with pandemic loans--little of the support actually got to small businesses that fit the definition that most of us would have in mind when we think about such businesses. It got intercepted by mega-millionaire celebrities, large businesses pretending to be small, and every other opportunist who saw yet another free payday in the offing.
I keep being struck that small businesses are like the middle-class in general: the people who obey the rules, are subject to the laws, and suffer the costs of compliance to federal and state dictates and yet we no longer recycle income back to them in recognition of their critical role in communities--it all gets redirected or stolen. I think this is why small businesses are, in the view of some social historians, the kernel that grew into modern American conservatism, because post-1950, they've genuinely had a grievance if they're between 5-50 employees, constantly receiving new mandates and yet never ever accessing the subsidies and supports doled out lavishly on giant corporations and savvy transfer-seekers.
I do recall the humongous number of bookstores in NYC and it was wonderful. I loved Strand and Barnes and Noble as it was back then. And the 3rd Ave/Bowery area bookstores. And the women's and Black bookstores uptown that did have sitting areas to read and talk. This was also before the big publishing houses subsumed so many of the independent, specialty grass roots publishers who could not compete with the larger houses. So that take over was ongoing way before the Big Box Stores. Fast forward40-50 years and i listened to ?? Icke give an interview about what he saw happening. He talked about the merging of economic ventures so money all flowed to the very wealthy while small businesses would be destroyed. He described this trajectory as intentional and part of the WEF Great Reset program which claims that "people will own nothing and be happy!" And that is the Klaus Schwab mantra that describes how people will lose ownership of homes, businesses, vehicles, etc. So while you posit a life life for local book stores and small businesses you really need to put this change into the bigger context to what we are all be subjected. We must develop a big picture understanding if we are to understand what is occurring on a micro issue level.