Wasted - The Berkeley Times 25 June, 2020 - W. J. Knox Carr

Wasted: Murder in the Recycle Berkeley Yard by John Byrne Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recycle Berkeley, a “scrappy and idealistic recycling collective,” came out of Barry’s experiences at the Ecology Center. VERY Berkeley, Brian Hunter moves, sussing out a takeover attempt of both a City Council election and “Re-Be”s unbusinesslike, argumentative mix of GenXYZs and aging hippies by the evil corporate Consolidated Scavenger, its conflicted, needy hench-yuppies, “opportunistic” workers and outright thugs.

This “green noir” grew on me as I went along, all the “locals” here he so accurately portrays. Gino: “I was always fixing things, making things. There were ecology types running around then too, the old dumps were getting full, the new ones had all these complicated rules for leachate collection and I went to San José State to study landfill engineering. Got a job out at Solano Sanitary in Benicia, owned by another Italian family….In the valley, it was the Irish. It was an honest living. Before the suits showed up.”

He gives away several major plot twists on the cover for some reason, which makes empathizing and suspense hard at first, with hard-boiled first-person narration and heartless analysis to boot. The rather large cortège of characters popping up in the first 50 pages is confusing; but it gives Wasted a fast-paced, metro feeling with people appearing and disappearing like the snippets of the Chronicle and East Bay Beat used as chapter lead-ins. Here today, gone tomorrow. Delete, delete, delete. Move on…

Barry’s collective workers guilt themselves and others that “everybody has to contribute to every decision,” making efficiency and “expertise” “bourgeois.” We’re at once “ahead of the curve,” but “hoodlums are throwing rocks” at a peaceful “protest” the media calls “a riot” and radical protestors call “the revolution.” Wasted, ©2015. “You try and reach consensus with a bunch of purer-than-thou-radicals.”

Sound familiar? Like a shouting match I heard during a Food Cooperative meeting in Minneapolis in 1979 or so. Or UW-Madison at The Daily Cardinal in early spring 1969-70, after Kent State. The more things change, the more they stay the same?

Murder or other crime, economic pressure, clash of values, beliefs or sexual struggles can split a family, a business; it can make a community, nation or even the world seem like either/or, too divided, unable to be healed.

I heard a “Zen proverb” the other day that helped me believe in bilateralism and unity, however: “The

left foot may be on a different leg than the right foot, but only by using both the left and the right can we move forward and make progress in the world.”

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