17th and Irving

Not sure what to call this

2009-08-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

I've spent a lot of the last year or year and a half thinking about education in a more general way than I was want to think of it in years prior. Much of this change in how I approached thinking about education was spurred by the introduction of more rigid "top-down" principles of what education is supposed to be brought in by the new principal of my school (who is in many ways simply an echo of the city of New York's educational policies which, in turn, are echoes of the Department of Education's policies).

Schools in New York City are burdened by budget deficits and all their resulting problems, but in the spirit of acquiescence, those who discuss these financial problems usually discuss them in a way to dampen the extreme to which finances ARE a problem. Often they point to this study or that school district in which spending deficits don't seem to have mattered quite as much as they do generally. None of the rich school districts that surround New York City (or Chicago, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles etc.) however, seem to be in a hurry to give back the money they get. Usually these amounts dwarf, per student, money spent on urban education. At New York City's public schools in wealthier areas, parents generally raise huge amounts of cash to supplement the educational budgets of their children's schools, I have yet to hear of anybody wondering if this is a waste of their money or energy. As a nation, our educational policies have created separate and unequal schools.

In order to get around the burden of these deficits, and to pay less per teacher, lessons are often supposed to be scripted in New York City's public schools. These scripts, which demand little input from the teacher, tie topics to various learning outcomes that comply with state-tests. The tests are devised to insure that teachers are following the scripts that seek to turn the art of teaching into a science. In this way, ingredients can be poured into a classroom in attempts to create classrooms with scientifically "predictable" outcomes. So far the outcomes have failed to improve standards of education and only increase the political manipulation of the results.

Edicts are issued about the proper way to question, the proper way to assess learning outcomes and pretty much anything that can be quantifiable, down to what a bulletin board outside of a classroom should look like. The bulletin boards are not there anymore to highlight the work of students in the class, but to reassure visitors from various state agencies that they are in fact, in a school that is aware of their various protocols and standards. After awhile these edicts sound like attempts to organize so many scatters of shells at a beach. Order is imposed simply for the sake of reaffirming the order established by those in power. What is unscripted is seen as a threat, a boast, irresponsible.

The message in an urban school to its students tends to be "don't mess this up." Because of gang violence and other assorted problems, scanning is probably necessary, but it is an ugly, unpleasant affair in which students are viewed first as potential threats, and only second as students. This is probably always going to be a problem, although, without having dwelt on the issue I would argue that there are some possible ways of making this a less confrontational affair. For instance, as it is now at our school, there are no lockers and for the students to wait in line, they must wait outside. There is probably a way to make sure that students don't have to wait outside in terrible weather, and it would be nice, if students only had to carry things like notebooks they did homework in and books they used. As of now, students have no place to keep their textbooks, so the textbooks stay at home and teachers attempt to hoard classroom sets that assistant principals want in their book rooms. As well, concerning lines, we should be looking at ways at making the process less confrontational, which will be difficult, because anywhere you have a couple thousand students waiting in a line because they are not trusted, you are going to have the potential for conflict. Sadly, the line into scanning sends a strong message of what we actually expect from our students. It is hard to eradicate that message and it is made harder when the students have so little input in what their school looks like. We might give them walls here and there for a mural, we might let them put up posters for a few activities, but clearly, when students see the bureaucratic slogans and state standards and other what-nots there not so much for them as for visitors from the state, the message is only reinforced: "this school does not belong to you and is not influenced by you. You come, go through the procedures we've set up for you and then leave." While teachers, other students and some administrators try to soften and change this message, the message is what begins everyday, and often it's the last poster the students see on their way out of the school. In order to get a poster up in the hallways at our schools, various forms must be filled out and the posters must be ok'd by multiple administrators.

The ideal teacher from an administrative viewpoint is not one who will challenge students to learn more than they thought they could, or one who will challenge assumptions, the ideal teacher is a link in a chain, communicating protocols and learning objectives to the students. These students will then successfully pencil in dots on a state test and write sentences in an approved fashion following various points from various grids to score a number on a test issued by the state of New York. As well, the ideal student is not one who challenges the assumptions of a teacher, who goes beyond a teacher's knowledge and brings back a new perspective for looking at a topic or subject, but rather one who will parrot the learning objectives in a way that indicates they have understood the topic so that they will score higher on these end of year tests. In the minds of those who devise the state history tests, it is more important to understand that the presidential cabinet is part of the unwritten constitution than it is to be fascinated by the vagaries, confusions, questions and assumptions of the world in which our government took form. To have become fascinated, to have delved into another world, means nothing if you have forgotten some of the canonical points of the topic several months later.

Art exists in the world, there is no blueprint that an artist would have to follow, rather the artist will choose various methods and modalities as she goes about her work to the extent that she needs them. Science on the other hand, eventually needs a laboratory where ideas, thoughts and experiments can be codified and examined with a minimum of prejudice. Looking back through the history of science, we can see how difficult it is to make a true laboratory - especially since the creation of a question often has a cultural impetus. Great scientists often have about them the air of an artist, and great artists often employ uncomfortable levels of scientific process in their work. I would argue though, that teaching intrinsically is more of an art than a science. There are goals for students, these goals can, to some degree, be assessed. Not to a percentage point, often not to a point on a chart, but simply to a skill learned and exhibited, and more importantly an assessment can be made of whether this student has gained some knowledge of what she believes by studying the topic and completing the activity. A good teacher will employ whatever tools she has at her disposal to help students reach various goals set by the teacher as they go through their curriculum, but the goals in the best classes are also set, in part, by the students. The student is not the object we hope to reach through a lesson, the student is the Reason for the lesson. And the point of the lesson, furthermore, is to help the student discover what it is that she is good at, what she excels at, and to help her figure out how it is that she wants to spend her life. Any lesson that does not have that at its base is useless and lessons that are simply attempts to meet a grid to be tested on a state test fail this and fail the students to a level that is contemptible. In short, they are defeated by their lack of flexibility, their inability to react to what happens organically in an uncontrolled environment. What an administrator sees though, in a large urban school system, is a way to save some money and to make a few politicians happy without threatening the world view of anybody with actual power.

At my own schools, growing up, I believe that this idea, that the student needed to discover her life's work and to question the world around her, was often the focus of the lessons. Often we had classes that we did not like, which we had to struggle through and learn just enough to get by, but in other classes we were discovering passions that we poured ourselves into with results that took us deeper into the subjects and deeper into questions we were asking to define ourselves. In none of the classes was there ever a focus on state tests or even SAT results; the idea being, I believe, that if we were working in our classes, these skills would become innate. When test scores to gratify parents and administrators (as well as some teachers I suppose) are the focus of our educational efforts, we deny students opportunities to ask questions about themselves and the world. Instead, we ask them to perform for us like so many circus animals.

I know that when I was in high school some students took classes to improve their SAT scores, that we obsessed over the scores, but I never felt pressure to take classes to prepare for SATs or ACTs and, along with the practice versions of those tests, these were the only standardized tests I remember being compulsory in high school. In thinking about my intelligence and my abilities, after trusting my own judgment, I would trust the judgment of my best teachers long before I trusted the abstract results of these standardized tests or made any conclusions about my abilities based on them. Getting a 90 on a Regents test would not validate or invalidate whatever it was I learned in a class, it would only suggest that on the day I took the test, I got lucky on a few guesses, I did not have a headache and that to some degree, I paid attention either to the class or to the textbook, perhaps both. As to mastery, its greatest power would be to suggest that, at least in this subject, I was probably not a complete idiot. Yet, for administrators, these results are paramount, even if they are often engineered, as newspaper stories sometimes point out, as much by various administrative powers or sociological conditions as by the students taking the tests.

This paramount importance of tests is true now whether they are SAT results in the wealthier school districts, or state-mandated Regents tests in the poorer districts of New York. These results can determine the endpoints of administrators' ambitions. They do not consider much the individuals who take the tests. Can an SAT result predict the success of an individual? No, but it can predict rather accurately the success of a population along a grid - useless for one student, useful only in sifting and organizing when individuals are considered so many shells on a beach by some administrator or someone wielding the powers of judgment over said administrator. A teacher's observations of her students are expected to be boiled down to numbers and preexisting statements that are filled in by number on a report issued six times a year. There is something wrong when decisions about individual school's educational policies and goals are based on tests taken on one day over several hours rather than on the observations of teachers whose jobs entail spending hundreds of hours with these same students and coming to understandings with them at individual, class and school levels.

In some school districts, and in some universities, administrators are trying to bring more administrative oversight into how grading is done. Sometimes this is by having grading conferences in which school goals are explicitly stated with resulting questions being simply about how we are going to reach those results in grade scores given. Sometimes, in other schools, administrators actually come in and look over various student work and tell the teacher what they believe the grade should be. Along with the loosening bonds of tenure, and the large number of teachers who have no tenure in public schools, this means that many grades are artificially inflated, and sometimes passing grades are given to students who barely show up. If the goal of education is to prepare a student to pursue their aspirations, we are giving them little in the ways of knowledge or skills for that pursuit of happiness.

At some level, the idea of a classroom has become too democratic for our decision makers, we are reaching some sad end in the line of management books that began appearing with great frequency in the 1980s. Our belief in Taylorism or the manipulations of the ideas of B.F. Skinner to produce outcomes that support management goals leave an alarmingly small sphere in which the student can focus on her own beliefs and goals while satisfying the goals and expectations of the grids. As well, the freedom and comfort that many in educational administration take in making judgments of students at this macro level is misguided and in its extremes, cruel. To label an 8 year old or a 16 year old with a level or a number is more than absurd, it is a crime against those children's ability to control and name their own futures. There are tests in many states for children as young as five years old. Standardized tests at this age that are not for individual issues and that are used to rate schools or push students towards certain tracks is beyond absurd.

Some programs, like special education programs or second language learner programs often lead to lower test scores on average and to spending money in the budget on things that do not help schools' ratings or "grades" as they're often called. With alarming frequency, principals facing tremendous budgetary constraints will attempt to reduce or even eliminate these programs. To attempt to eliminate programs that help students who have less a chance of reflecting glory on a school in an attempt to cut the number of those students who use those programs goes against the very foundation of a democratic society and the principles of public schooling. It is wrong in every ethical consideration that there is and it sends a clear message to those students and to the people who try to help them: you are an impediment. The impediment, in actuality, is the system that encourages ways of thinking that lead to these kinds of decisions. It is a system that robs many of the most vulnerable without consequence to those who already have built-in advantages that practically assure them of comfortable lives regardless of the decisions they make.

As teachers, we need to make our classrooms into places where students explore and expand their own abilities through activities constructed around our areas of expertise so that we may help them and sometimes serve as guide, sometimes as interpreter and explainer and sometimes as taskmaster. It is not that I'm against larger curricula that we, as teachers, measure ourselves against and that we use to keep on a larger schedule, I'm for that, especially as exposure to different topics is key for students just being introduced to the large spectra of our disciplines. I do believe, however, that we should be trusted to a greater degree to envision and plan our classes, to assess our students and to determine what it is that our classrooms should look like and what they should reflect. I believe given that freedom, schools will work more for students rather than the private ambitions of those entrusted with the responsibilities of running public schools.

Students will work with many different types of people during their lives, and their first exposure to this reality is in the classroom, where they are surrounded by a myriad of teachers and fellow students. Rather than attempting to codify and regularize those people an individual student will come into contact with, a school administrator should do her best to see that individuals will be exposed to as great a variety of people and environments as possible, especially if she really believes the students under her supervision will be competing in a global marketplace.

As a teacher too, I believe it is my responsibility to examine and name my beliefs about my areas of study and to challenge them by learning more and examining more thoughts about those things I am learning about. As well, I want the freedom to bring in new ideas and topics that might challenge students or speak more closely to their own interests, in other words, I want to be able to react to my students with greater freedom and to have the trust of my school leadership that I am imparting necessary skills and knowledge. In the spirit of that, I have always welcomed classroom visitors at any time and have always been willing to listen to ideas about my classroom if the intent is to help the students and to help me think about new issues and problems. When dealing with New York City's educational policy makers however, this conversation about my classroom has been almost exclusively a one way street and it seems that, in this, nothing will change until new ways of thinking have penetrated the Department of Education in New York. I am praised for the ways in which I am following directives and criticized sometimes for not having followed protocols; I am judged almost exclusively on passing rates and test scores. One way I was criticized this year was to have pointed out that I had not distributed a study guide issued by a private company assisting in instructing for the state Regents tests. In fact I had issued the books (though I made no lessons in conjunction with them because I found them rote and limiting in the ways I wanted my students to think about history), but the particular administrator making that criticism had not bothered to ask if I had distributed these books or not. The unopened box of guides the administrator was referring to spoke to the sad attendance rates that are a problem city-wide and not just at my particular school, the other two boxes had been opened and distributed. When that person was in my room, that box was just another box on a checklist. My classroom is more than a checklist, and in fact, when that person was in my room, there were many more important things going on that would have told the person much more about whether my students were being challenged and learning history.

Still, rather than respond to this problem in any meaningful way, and rather than ask the question, why do so many of our students believe it is not necessary to attend school, our administrators work tirelessly to thin the ranks of students on our rolls and to make the ones who don't show up someone else's problem. They do not do this out of cruelty, they do it in attempt to keep their schools open. They do it to avoid punishment, just as many teachers follow a script and just as many students follow that same script. Inspiration as a possibility in problem solving is non-existent, and piece-meal solutions which might effect some good are ignored in search of city-wide protocols or other such instruments that avoid individual scrutiny. This does not just do a disservice to teachers and students, but to the administrators themselves, who given, theoretically, greater leeway to run their schools, are actually handicapped by the fears of their political leadership.

As a society we should be asking hard questions about our educational policies, and they should start with the question of why do so many of our most at-risk students find so little to motivate them to attend school and to graduate? Why does a student at an urban school have to be so extraordinary and so awake to life's challenges so much younger than do students at suburban and wealthier schools? How can we engage students while maintaining the validity of our academic disciplines and their focuses of study? Why do we have public schools?

As a teacher I should be encouraged to find creative ways to approach my students' needs, interests and content knowledge. My own experience in this regard is not without reason for optimism, as I believe my direct supervisor has encouraged to the extent she can, experimentation, variation and topic-depth. Sadly, however, the further you go up the chain, the less support their seems to be for these important aspects of teaching, and the quicker these encouragements are trumped by the pressures of a system of oversight that considers the needs of the students considerably after it thinks about how meals will be catered at the next closed door meeting.

In a democratic society it is natural that their should be a dialogue on educational practice and what should make up acceptable classrooms and what definitely does not make an acceptable classroom, however, by mirroring a love for numerical results and for the false adherence to accountability and "the bottom line" politicians and community leaders love to pretend to pledge allegiance to even as they are finding ways to further their own ambitions without regard to these ideals, we are doing our next generation a grave disservice and I believe the parameters for debate should grow to include much more about class, denial of services and the influence of script-writing into teaching practice. As well, we should look at the motivations and methods behind budget allocations and at the difference in educational planning at schools that service middle and upper class students verse those that service students who are growing up in poverty.

Note: I have attempted to relate little of my personal experiences as a teacher while writing this because I wanted to attempt to begin understanding what bigger issues I was tying my reactions to as a teacher over the last year and a half or so. I suppose the next logical step is to look at my own practice as a teacher and to figure out what I should be learning from my own experience and how I should use these experiences to further inform my own teaching methods - which I'm doing in my planning, but maybe it would help to write out a reaction as well. I should also think about how I would imagine an administration should react to its teachers and students and think about the problems and positive steps that could be created in that paradigm. Finally, I should think about a question I brought up as a suggestion for administrators and politicians to think about - which is - why do we have public schools - or better put - why should we have public schools.

I know that this is chiefly for myself - but maybe somebody else will stumble on it. Hopefully, if that's the case, you will forgive these half-formed thoughts...

A few thoughts after downloading Boswell's Life of Johnson for my iPhone

2008-11-15T15:32:00.003-05:00

When I noticed Boswell's Life of Johnson available as an application for the iPhone I did not hesitate. Even abridged, having Boswell and Johnson around with me made me too happy to even imagine. Wherever I was, and I saw myself in terrifying and boring places, pleasant places, there would be Boswell telling me about Johnson to wile away the time in better company than I would otherwise have (I mean, they would add much to any dinner party). So I downloaded it.

In the shower afterward I had a vaguely troubling thought. I was thinking about Samuel Johnson, the teachers who showed me his brilliance and gave me the keys they had to approach him and I began to wonder why I loved Johnson more than Blake.

I know they're not directly connected, and that style and matters of thought might be quite different to them, but they were writers who I was exposed to in equal measure, and who I have read with equal fervor. So why was my preference for Johnson rather than the radical prophet? This wasn't an aesthetic judgment, or an agreement of philosophies, I don't know if I have a nuanced understanding to the point where my preference could be founded on those kinds of foundations. Instead, I suppose it was a personal sense, and maybe it was Johnson's doubts at the end of the day, that appealed to me more than the certainties of Blake - though Blake's touch seems more modern, more direct and more dizzying. I don't know though, the sheer audacity of taking on the Dictionary is pretty brilliant.

I don't want to think too deeply on this, because writing intelligently about it would take time and I haven't eaten today. But it was on my mind, and I'd never really realized, I suppose, how much more I love Johnson than most writers. My feelings of almost relief at thinking I could have The Life around with me wherever I went surprised me and made me wonder at what this preference for someone of Johnson's character said about me.

Some thoughts on the presidential race now that August is upon us...

2008-08-07T18:27:00.001-04:00

I'm not happy with the passivity of Obama's campaign over the last five or six weeks, however, there's this feeling I have that Obama might be attempting to ride over this wave as a kind of inevitable reaction of fear to his candidacy. By allowing the fear to his candidacy to grow as ugly as possible as the Republicans seek to provoke him into a stupid response with their veritable chest-thumping "Obama's a traitor who wants to suck the gas out of your car and give it to the hoot owls while you eat out of a grocery's dumpster," it might be that at the end of this road he can come out with a some kind of sane response that gains some traction with voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida while at the same time giving the Republican attacks the true shape of their idiotic ludicrousness.

I fear though, that this isn't going to work. That the Republicans, on a national level, are very good at giving the electorate a framework through which to view the presidency and its responsibilities and necessities. I believe American voters have proven time and time again that they want somebody in there who is a ball-breaker, who won't take bullshit and who is kind of macho. This was where Hillary had her greatest success among Democratic voters and she rolled up pretty huge victories in some of the swing states - she wasn't talking issues when she was beginning to win.

As well, I think, and I know I am speaking in great generalities here, that the Republicans have done an excellent job of making decisions about things like the environment seem, time and time again, like a decision between pragmatism and loony-we-don't-care-how-much-this-hurts-you-as-long- as-it-doesn't-hurt-a-dolphin arguments. In fact, environmentalism, in pretty much every study when dealing with energy delivery or car-design and in many other directions, shows tremendous potential to actually grow the economy in some pretty exciting directions.

It's hard to imagine at this point that the election is going to be won on issues, it's another popularity contest and the way to win those is to paint mustaches and boogers on your opponent's face. I mean, who wants to hear about the detail points of saving a bleeding and rocky infrastructure when you can hear about how Obama did or did not visit troops and how come? It would be refreshing to hear more opinions about what needs to be done voiced by the American voter rather than on their opinions on one candidate or other. I think when voters are asked to respond on issues, many of them have salient and insightful points to make, sadly when asked to respond to the actors in this campaign, they seem, increasingly, to respond with the conventional fallacies that are taking the lead in determining where this election will lead.

This little article at New York Magazine seems like pretty good reading - and it's quick.

Some clips and coming attractions from favorite movies...

2008-07-15T14:05:00.004-04:00

This one is from Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live) - it's my third favorite scene in my favorite movie:

"Oh David, don't be irrelevant." - Two from Bringing Up Baby:

One of the more famous scenes in The Graduate - but it sums up his alienation pretty well...my favorite scene is the jump cut from the pool to the telephone booth, but it's not on youtube...:

Five Easy Pieces - a scene and the preview: the scene between the hero and his father at the end is I think one of the greatest:

There is no better than Rushmore - a god of films - "I'll take puncuality.":

I could do this all day - but I should do something with the day...

Bemoaning Obama

2008-07-04T02:51:00.002-04:00

To Whom It May Concern (I wrote at the Obama website),

I have been a strong supporter of Obama since he was in a tough campaign for the Democratic spot on the Senate ticket. Running against a Chicago machine Democrat with all kinds of support, his looked a quixotic campaign at best. But one worth running.

Even then, with an audience measuring in the small thousands, he seemed to promise a new way of approaching politics.

I believed in him again through a tough Democratic primary against a candidate that only a few years ago I wanted badly to one day be president: Hillary Clinton.

I believed in him more as he made inspirational speeches on important issues and difficult stands on issues not always immediately popular.

Now, I wonder if that belief, no, that faith, is not misguided. Over the last couple of weeks I have found Obama to be pandering to voters and to wealthy donors in ways that I find deeply disappointing at best, his defense of FISA for instance, left me shaking my head in disbelief.

I donated money to twice to the campaign to make this man president?

If I wanted to throw my support against the Constitution it appears I have come to the right place. I am embarrassed that a candidate I have defended and argued for, has turned his back on the values that make this country worth fighting for.

I am not against "flip-flopping" when circumstances change - for instance, in Iraq we are at an odd moment, and perhaps we will have to slow down our military withdrawal, more competent people than I know more - and unlike Bush, I hope Obama listens to them. To a certain extent, I understand Obama's need to maintain some positional flexibility, not for reasons of politics so much as for reasons of policy. I remain deeply convinced however, that we must end the abyss of money that goes into that war as quickly as is actually possible.

But his support of three things bother me to the point where I will withdraw my active support if they are views that are real or left unexplained in any cogent manner:

1) His support of the Supreme Court's ruling (a ruling led by Scalia, Alito and Roberts) that endangered protective laws against guns. I can't imagine a man who has worked with urban non-profit groups could possibly be for this ruling. As somebody who works in a deeply troubled New York City High School, I know first-hand what guns on the street can do to children. One of my students was shot through the heart, a random victim of a drive-by. She lived. She shuddered in class sometimes, they used to call that shell-shock. Now it's post-traumatic stress disorder. Another student of mine got shot seventeen times. Finally, one other, on her way to a bodega four years ago, never made it home. On their graduation day last week, my students had a moment of silence for her. A life should be worth more than a moment of silence, it should contain multitudes, instead, of celebration and joy. In Chicago, some teachers are afraid their students will revolt if they find out one more of their classmates was a victim of gun/gang violence. Clearly, laws already don't work, but instead of destroying them, perhaps we should find ways to strengthen them. Perhaps the gun dealers who knowingly sell to dealers who will re-sell or distribute should find themselves in danger of devastating prison sentences. Perhaps manufacturers should not be allowed to market or develop certain types of guns that appeal to gangsters.

Perhaps Obama should take another look at the language of the Second Amendment, written at a time when on our borders were lined with foreign threats and sometime hostile Indian tribes, this in a time before organized police forces. The second amendment reads differently if viewed through this prism. It basically seems to say that creating defense forces (like the police) cannot be limited by Federal authority.

2) His sudden support for FISA. This is a sickening and pandering play to the "Middle" of the electorate still scared by a political system more eager to blind its citizens than inform them. How has this happened? Well, whatever bright-eyed aide convinced him of this should be fired. Turning our backs on the Constitution's protections is not something I want my president to do. Ever. I felt sucker punched by this. Especially considering his prior statements about this act, which showed a nuanced contempt.

3) Finally I could not believe that Obama criticized the Court decision that limited the death penalty to cases involving murder. While the death penalty is a deeply flawed instrument of revenge in a system of law - already philosophically troubled - I have given up hope of a candidate with the courage to challenge its existence. But not to challenge its use as it is practiced in the United States? Not to ask the very real and excellent questions asked in the majority opinion is folly. How can one, for instance, quantify a non-murder crime? To what extent will the death penalty option bury certain sex crimes (since many involving children are sadly within family)? How will the courts handle the glut of procedures that might follow an enacting of this kind of punishment for this kind of crime? They're already overburdened. Should the Supreme Court protect the functionality of the court system as laid out in Article Three of the Constitution? At a time when in Illinois the death penalty has already been proven broken and unjust, it seems we should question with great skepticism any expansion of the death penalty, at the very least.

Obama, instead of asking these real questions, instead of challenging conventional wisdom and forcing voters to look deeper into the ideas of what it means to be an American, is settling for pandering. Pandering is the Bush administration. We don't need that anymore.

I thought we were supposed to be supporting a change: to how politicians gamed the system and left Americans out of the loop and vulnerable to the abuses of power.

I wonder now just what we are supporting.

with continued hope but shaken faith,

Andrew Decker
Brooklyn, NY//Mt. Prospect, IL

Space Chimps: fact, fiction, video game

2008-06-02T02:30:00.001-04:00

Supposed to be finishing the grading of the tests...it'll have to wait. I've been thinking about monkeys in space while listening to A Silver Mt. Zion - I'm all trippy:

The Legacy of Space Chimps
By Jeremy Hsu
posted: 30 May 2008
7:02 am ET

Chimps may represent the forgotten link in the evolution of human spaceflight

A new documentary and a separate upcoming animated film both hearken to the early days of the U.S. space program, when chimpanzees preceded men into the great unknown of space.

"Most people don't really want to acknowledge the chimpanzee missions as particularly historic," said David Cassidy, director and producer of the documentary "One Small Step: The Story of the Space Chimps."

But when Cassidy dug up footage of the U.S. Air Force's chimp program from the national archives and other sources, he also found press reels celebrating the exploits of the space chimps Ham and Enos. Ham paved the way for the first American to ever fly in space, Alan Shepherd, and Enos flew before just before John Glenn orbited the Earth.

Film footage reveals a time when the infant U.S. space program struggled to successfully launch rockets, let alone humans. That prompted the Air Force to train a group of chimps to test the physical effects of launch and spaceflight.

The documentary includes interviews with Ham's handler, who fondly recalled the chimp as "a sociable little guy" who adored the people around him. By contrast, Enos tended to give humans the cold shoulder.

Cassidy does not skimp on the darker side of the space chimp story. Some scenes that make for hard viewing include decompression sled tests which caused brain damage in chimps and human volunteers alike, as noted in the film by an Air Force physiologist. Chimp training appears to have involved a combination of rewards, such as juice sips, and punishment through electric shocks.

The act of chimp spaceflight was no laughing matter, either. Ham's apparent grin of happiness upon his return to Earth actually signified "the most extreme fear" through his baring of teeth, according to the film's interview with renowned biologist Jane Goodall.

However, Cassidy pointed out that people were just beginning to understand the intelligence and capabilities of chimpanzees in the 1960s.

"Most of the humans involved in the program grew very attached to the chimps and treated them very decently," Cassidy told SPACE.com.

That did not prevent the Air Force from eventually putting its chimp colony up for sale after the first successful human spaceflight missions. Although Ham lived out the rest of his life at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, N.C., most chimps ended up at a biomedical research facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Twenty one chimps were eventually rescued by Carole Noon, a biological anthropologist who sued the Air Force for custody and founded the Center for Captive Chimpanzee Care in Florida. The center now houses the largest chimp sanctuary in the world with over 135 residents.

Cassidy made the documentary after first hearing Noon's story, because he thought the chimps "need to be treated with a certain level of dignity" after their contributions to the U.S. space program. He pointed to the Russians, who unveiled a monument to Laika the space dog this past April.

"It's kind of fantastical when you think that we treated chimps like humans, trained them, dressed them up in space suits, and shot them up," Cassidy said. "You see how it can inspire an animated film."

That upcoming animated film "Space Chimps" takes a decidedly lighter tone with Ham III, the future grandson of Ham, and a crew of chimponauts blazing new trails for humanity by piloting a spacecraft through an inter-dimensional wormhole. They end up on a planet teeming with alien life and political intrigue — a mission outcome that scientists can only dream of.

A "Space Chimps" video game will also accompany the film's July 18 release, featuring single player and cooperative modes with plenty of simian acrobatics in colorful alien environments.

Perhaps chimps may one day play another role in dangerous space exploration, but they'll face stiff competition from robotic probes. Still, it's worth remembering that one small step into space that threw the doors open for human spaceflight.

"One Small Step: The Story of the Space Chimps" was directed and produced by David Cassidy, and is available at www.spacechimps.com. The "Space Chimps" animated film was produced by Vanguard Animation/Twentieth Century Fox, and will open in theaters on July 18. The "Space Chimps" video game will be released in July on PS2, X360, Wii, and NDS.

Where logic "doesn't have no relevance"...

2008-05-04T14:03:00.002-04:00

How is she pandering and slobbering today?

a) going on about elites
b) pretending she understands long commutes and pain of gas prices
c) not putting in her lot with so-called "experts"
d) talking about the little people she's meeting
e) all of the above

If you've guessed (e) then you've really got the measure of perhaps the most depressing and dispiriting descent into political opportunism since, oh, 2004.

From the Times:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supports her plan for a gas tax suspension.

She did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Throughout the exchange, Mrs. Clinton argued that she trusted her own eyes and ears instead. “This gas tax issue to me is very real because I have been meeting people across Indiana and North Carolina who drive for a living, who commute long distances, who would save money,” she said.

Senator Barack Obama has derided the gas-tax suspension as a gimmick that would save consumers little and cost thousands of jobs, and Kara Glennon, a member of the audience at a town-hall meeting, seemed to agree. Gas prices are “not academic” for her, she told Mrs. Clinton, because she makes less than $25,000 a year—and then she accused Mrs. Clinton of pandering. “Call me crazy, but I listen to economists because I think I know what they studied,” she said.

However, in an interview afterward, Mark Moorman, another audience member and a firefighter, said he shared Mrs. Clinton’s mistrust of experts. Political candidates cite economists but they “never say anybody’s name, or where the study came from,” he said. “So as far as me, it doesn’t have no relevance.”

Hillary Clinton, caring about the little people, because you know, the Clintons have always cared about the little people. I mean she was on the board at Wal-Mart, and everybody knows how well Wal-Mart has cared for its employees and in what high esteem they hold them. Hell, Sam Walton, that little person of little people, went so far as to call her "a great friend of ours." And by "ours" of course he meant little people everywhere, not those big nasty elites. And by elites, of course I'm not talking about somebody worth $109 million dollars or the dozens of billions of dollars the Waltons are worth. I'm talking about you and me, so Hillary, I believe you, and I invite you to come to my school and tell my students to their faces why as Senator you have put absolutely no pressure on the state of New York to make sure that our school gets just as much money per student as the schools in Great Neck and Chautauqua and then you can tell them about how you had no problem authorizing the insane president of the United States to use these same little people to go to Iraq seven or eight times each, some of them, to fight a war for the other little people like Haliburton and the various fellows of the Carlyle Fund. Maybe we can talk about what you did on your time at Wal-Mart to help the workers unionize or get higher pay or greater access to health care - after all, health care is so important to you and the little people are so important to you, I'm sure you have all kinds of things you can say. Or you can prattle on about the elites some more and we can all wonder at the inanity of this campaign being run in the middle of a moment when the only important things are the things we are not talking anything about.

A definition of art that I like

2008-01-19T00:20:00.000-05:00

Bobby Fischer died in Iceland. Deeply troubled for perhaps his entire life, a kind of Freudian wreck out of Dostoevsky - a Jew-hating loner with a Jewish mother - another chess master was talking about playing him and said this - which I thought was so beautiful:

“'It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,' recalled Mr. Byrne...'He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.'

"Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators."

It comes from somewhere, that ability to elicit appreciation at such a level.

He was paranoid, afraid of the Russians openly in a way that many of us in the Cold War would have loved to have been, accusing them of attempting to get him - individually - not one of x million souls in the Chicago area or the Boston area or whatever, but him, one individual on a plane. That idea that ANY individual might matter in the face of hydrogen bombs, seems to me, a small act of necessary assertion. But it was probably also a slow but quickening seeping of madness. It seems from the outside anyway...

Regardless, the semester ended today basically. I took home a bag of papers to grade - I was so tired I didn't bother going out tonight. I thought about it, and then I thought, "what's the point really?"

I finished a book I'd dawdled on, read at another and listened to the Magnetic Fields album - which I like a lot on the first listen. We'll see how it holds up...

Random Lists

2008-01-14T02:47:00.000-05:00

Usually I just leave these on my occasional blog at myspace...but I can't sleep, so I figured this might go in both places, but here with a picture as well...

Can't sleep...so...more lists perhaps.

Five things I Have Pretended Not To Notice in My Life at Various Points:
1. Bum masturbating into trashcan at 15th and 6th Avenue
2. Bum? Fratboy? Both? Throwing up between parked cars on tenth street
3. Sleeping student(s) who when awake is loud
4. The poor bum with the burned out eyes who walks along the train asking for money with a cardboard sign describing how his eyes were burned out.
5. Onrushing Fate and aging//vomit stained sidewalks

Five songs that make me think of high school:
1. Just Another Day - Oingo Boingo
2. True Faith - New Order
3. Harborcoat - R.E.M.
4. Shoplifters of the World Unite - the Smiths
5. Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix

Five pieces of furniture I have loved in my life:
1. My bed that I got after I'd been sleeping on the floor for 7 months after I first got to New York. I remember not sleeping in what felt like only a step above a gerbil's den for the first time, that first weekend when I could sleep in. And for some reason I felt like a ship captain. I think it was the room, with the wooden slats on the ceiling.
2. The formica kitchen table we had growing up. It looked like the future from a 1950s point of view.
3. The orange chair I read in while I was growing up. I could read there, in various positions, for up to about 15 hours at a stretch. It was maybe the best chair of all time.
4. The rocking chair I had at 1429 Rascher, which I found at this freaky antique store that had about 7432 crosses in it, many with Jesus in horrible, excruciating, bleeding pain. But man, what a rocking chair. It felt like summer all year in that rocking chair.
5. The blue bookcases that were my grandmother's. The carving is pretty, and the size is conducive to good organization.

Five times I felt absolutely at peace:
1. The first time I struck out the side pitching: walking back to the dugout. I remember I gave a half-skip at one point. I was pretty stoked.
2. Bobbing up to the water after the first time off the high dive. i was still alive. The sun felt good. I wanted to go up again.
3. Sledding after this blizzard when we were 19 - we were a bit old for it - it was super late - afterwards there was sleepy/comfortable discussion in Terhune's kitchen.
4. Driving to this abandoned coal city once in Southern Illinois on the crest of a storm - Jeff was driving - Jason was turning around to say something and in the background was the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" which just sounded so foreboding - but we were laughing. The end of school was only three weeks away.
5. Building Legos with Tom when I was nine. We had an amazing space station planned out. We built some amazing space ships.
5b. This one time when I first had my license, and I was driving down Rand Road, it was the spring of junior year - a Saturday - I'd just gone to this record store that specialized in imports of punk and industrial records - The Turntable - i was listening to Led Zeppelin IV on the 8-track - the car felt so good and I had nowhere special to be for the rest of the afternoon. I don't know why. But it was pretty great.

Time for sleep I hope.

Trees at night in Chicago and New York - one blurry, one less blurry. I love to think about trees when I can't sleep, out there, comfortable in the night air. It's so peaceful to think about.

Deep into Autumn

2007-11-13T01:26:00.000-05:00

Mostly I graded tests today. I finished putting together a table that had been lying half built by the far window but it's still a little wobbly. I tried to put in a screw to brace it but for some reason the threads wouldn't catch in the wood right, so nothing happened. Outside it's been damp and gray all day and into the night. In the streetlights a fog seems to suggest itself.

Right now I have the song "Winter" on from Goats Head Soup, it's gorgeous. Full of sharp, clear sounds and this great string section that comes in at the end, like the Stones were always able to do from that time, it sounds perfect, unforced. Like it's just touched Phil Spector wall-of-sound but stayed true to guitars and the meanings in words rather than just the emotions. It's full of the feelings of interiors and warmth.

But mostly today I've been thinking about Joy Division and Ian Curtis. I saw Control at the Village East and it was a strange experience. I was expecting a haunted musical genius kind of biopic, but as it was taken from his wife's memoirs it really ignored all the mystique and stripped down the story of Joy Division to this kind of psychological confusion (caused in part by physiologic factors) blooming in the soil of sense of duty, sense of regret, competing definitions of love and a sense that the dreams were somehow bigger than the realities imagined. In a sense, the movie took a band that almost defines mystique, and stripped it down to just another struggle in definitions and ashes of dreams.

Joy Division, for me, was a necessity in high school, one of the bands I would have killed myself without, along with the Smiths, the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, a few others probably I should mention. Isolation, foreboding, frustration and these cold drums, that odd always compelling voice. How it would all hold back and then break into a wave of feeling: the Cure from about 1982 on couldn't have existed if it didn't rip off wholeheartedly every lick Joy Division ever played. But unlike the Cure, Joy Division didn't wear that emotion on its collective sleeve, there was no parade, just this kind of paroxysm of feeling, the kind of thing that seemed so real when you had to politely listen to every single body and not reply with any part of yourself. The songs build and reward patience, by the end there's this overwhelming energy in many of the songs, and they're so filled with feelings they seem to rip the songs apart. I think "Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures is my favorite song by them, but "Transmission," "She's Lost Control," "Isolation," and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" are right there. He was only 20 or 21 when he wrote these songs, in the movie they show him quoting from Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold," and I suppose it makes sense he would be attracted to the Romantic poets. Shelley was dead by 30, Byron by 36, Keats youngest still at 26 (with his annis mirabilis in 1818/1819 when he was 23 and 24 years old), Wordsworth's best work was almost all completely done in his youth, as was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (only Blake, burning with prophecy and mission, continued to improve and grow as an artist into his age). Ian Curtis didn't even make it to the fabled age of 27. He was dead at 23.

When I was a kid I used to think about him killing himself, right before the American tour. I used to imagine it was this amazing world weariness, a sense that the polish of the world had dulled, revealing everything as garish and full of grotesqueries fit only for the night. In a sense I always rebelled against this feeling his suicide seemed to suggest, though I sympathized with it. But this film seems to suggest he died from a feeling of exactly the opposite, a fullness of life that couldn't reconcile his beliefs with his actions, couldn't stand the thought that a gesture wasn't complete in and of itself, that it couldn't somehow continue defining the world long past the point that it was given. Or that at the very least, that gesture couldn't define him by itself, for those the gesture was meant for.

I'd been afraid to see this movie, it's been out for a bit now, but I knew it would dredge up all this stuff I hadn't thought about it in awhile, just by its subject matter. It's probably a bit much to write about now, and it all seems unfocused, my writing. But now I'm starting to think about how I'm supposed to wake up tomorrow, and my thoughts are clouding.

I took this picture walking to work the other day - and I thought of it when I was thinking of the movie right now - at one point he writes about a cloud that marks a cloud. This cloud is full of light.

et ceteras...

2007-09-26T17:49:00.001-04:00

I've been looking for another place, preferably in Greenpoint (how I love Greenpoint) - staying in Fort Greene, it's an odd walk home with the Williamsburg Bank Building all wrapped up in scaffolding and quiet. No twenty-something hipsters in sight usually. Occasionally right along Fulton you'll see a couple of them briefly, but usually it's just some random stragglers coming home late.

The school year's been frustrating, but the kids seem ok, I have vague hopes for when things are more settled. Some women just came to my room a minute ago - it's late, almost six - and she said there were all these people downstairs talking about small schools. I'd never seen her. Then she said large class sizes are not the problem and left.

Why do all these morons come to my room and tell me dumb things? I've never met her and she comes to my room, looks at all the desks and then says class size doesn't matter. Lady, it does. Go away.

I still have to get some maps. A bunch of mine were torn down and disappeared. As well, I lost one of my favorite books. Casualties of the early school year insanities. I feel the Iraq War has entered its "Vietnam, 1971" point, where it's happening, people are dying, but the country itself is thinking about everything EXCEPT the war. A lot of people dying, they don't even count the numbers of non-sectarian dead it seems, but then you say, how do you decide it's a sectarian and it's all made up. Just a vast number of people who are dying from inertia.

I was in Philadelphia visiting a friend a few weeks ago, and she was defending some of the tenets of this administration and some of their contentions, but at this point, those arguments veer so quickly into the absurd, the untenable and the abstract as to be dismissed with barely the wave of a hand. But the results of these policies won't be nearly so easily dismissed, and I'm wondering how much future policy is already written on these contentions simply because some of them sound good and pro-American. Which is why, I guess, it's so important to start looking more closely at the laissez-faire principles that are so prevalent right now in corporate America. Well, that's the odd thing, is that it's not so laissez-faire unless the discussion is on these huge corporations that can ante in and act as yet another branch of government. Smaller businesses, traditionally more innovative, are squeezed out more and more quickly so that a typical block in Manhattan looks exactly like a typical mall in Schaumburg, Illionois or Orange County, California. The only thing that's missing is the sprawl.

Anyway, the point of that little half-informed screed is to suggest that a language needs to be constructed that can answer these various contentions, like the ones that suggest that decorum and polite language towards our generals are important when they are lying to us for political reasons. The betrayal of our highest military officers to the duty to country before political partisanship will be one of the main chapters of the histories to come about this war and about this era. I wonder if we have ever had a military so politicized as this one. Again, I think of Vietnam, General Westmoreland coming to give his little pep talks in November and December of 1967, mere weeks in front of Tet, and everybody applauding and happy, calling for reasons for optimism. It's enjoyable to go back and read some of the articles appearing around that time. It's different now, General Petreus and his ilk have very little credibility outside of the circle of true believers, but they do offer some shade to those afraid to be left in the sun, and who would like to toe the party line without being hung out to dry for doing so. Going to the American people and saying "I trusted a general" shouldn't wash, but it will in some places.

I'm thinking about this maybe a little after the fact, but I've been kind of turning it over in my head for awhile and while I don't have much to add to all the stuff that's out there, it is funny to me how even relatively unsophisicated viewers of the political scene, like myself, know all the steps to the dance to be done by those in the middle, who put careers and form above belief and values. Although the baldness of Sen. Vitters (R-LA) absurdity as an electable human being to any office involving any kind of voting by other human beings continues to surprise me. He seems to be trying to shore up some kind of base he might have lost by fcking various ladies of the night by taking some funds earmarked for education and earmarking that money for the Louisiana Family Forum, a group advocating creationism "to develop a plan to promote better science education." Again, old news, but news so indicative of a culture that has clearly lost any reason to move forward. America profoundly lacks any kind of real mission or real sense of national cohesion. It seems that even if a small number of actively involved citizenry had a kind of galvinizing mission we would be better off, after all, most of the time, most of the citizens of any state don't have any particular mission or real sense of coherent cohesion, and it's probably for the best that it's so, but there should be some sense emanating from somewhere for concepts like social justice, improvement in how the worst off among us live life and in educating a new generation not just of elites of but of all citizens. We are reaping a whirlwind otherwise.

It's late, I've been here too long and I've got to figure out some place to go.

Late at Night

2007-08-27T03:36:00.000-04:00

There was a lot of flooding here last week, and all weekend breakfast places were closed, streets impassable and the electricity off for a lot of Chicago. Oddly, the house was untouched, the cats lay around with nothing out of the ordinary for them. The weather became beautiful by last night, and tonight is perfect, one forgets our own fingerprints on the earth in this kind of weather, the earth seems so perfectly attuned.

I'm listening to Miles Davis's Ascenseur Pour L'Échafaud, specifically this amazing track that sounds like the perfection of 1950s jazz all by itself, "Générique." A lot of the jazz purists (those not wetting themselves), insist this is not one of Miles's better moments; it's for Louis Malle's first film, and it's actually, I think, pretty perfect. It's amazing how it changes and deepens the movie. So maybe it's not Birth of the Cool or Kind of Blue, but it's amazing and it has this edge to it that kind of sounds like the beginning of the French New Wave to me: that combination of Paris and America in this uncomfortable embrace, all in love with each other but not sure how it's all supposed to fit and what it all means. This is a very imperfect description of it, but regardless, "Générique" I think is required listening for anybody interested in Miles Davis. I seem to be a bit more each year.

Otherwise, my life is still vaguely on hold, which is cool. I wish it wasn't, but I think Billy Bob got at that best in Bad Santa, so whatever works will.

It's hard to worry when the crickets are as beautiful as they are, when the Lake reflects the moon in a million places: one shimmer, and the air is brisk and has, for the first time really, the slightest tastes of autumn about it late at night. No phone, no reason to rush off, and cats lounging and skulking about. In a bit I'll read for just a chapter or two and call it the end of the day, but regardless of what's happening, like so many others, it's a day to store up against other days not so beautiful or perfect.

I read through this book, They Marched Into Sunlight, which really gets at a lot of things that made 1968 much easier to understand for me. It takes place primarily in the autumn of 1967, and looking at the microcosms the way he does really beautifully traced some of the macro-thinking that was going on in Washington, Vietnam and in the Anti-War movement. It's weird to look at all these pictures of Madison, Wisconsin, to see places I've hung out around just totally transformed by belief and conflict. It makes me wonder how people from the 1870s and 1880s would look at Union Square or Tomkins Square Park now.

Off to read and enjoy the way the night feels.

Humidity Again

2007-08-14T17:11:00.000-04:00

Bro called at eleven and lunch was off. School starts for him tomorrow, meetings only.

So I finished Black Swan Green by David Mitchell and, at some point, turned the air conditioner back on, which I hate to do because I miss the sounds of the cicadas and the crickets. When you have those sounds you should go out of your way for them, but I'll sit outside late tonight, when it's just crickets. Yesterday night felt uneasy, like there were things in it, and then a huge thunderstorm again just before dawn which woke me up. The rain made soothing rushing sounds between the other sounds of the storm.

Right now "Love Athena" by the Olivia Tremor Control just came on, which I love. Happy accident but I had to stop for a minute to listen and lost my place.

This is a good part of the year - so much reading gets done, a lot of thinking - but already it's mid-August and unlike other years I don't feel rested in the least. I wonder if that will make for a more difficult year?

Black Swan Green was full of all sorts of things and nearly perfect. I don't want to prattle on, but I think I respect David Mitchell more than any other writer right now. Just now, I'm thinking of the book, set in 1982, and how Tony Wilson just died, and it does seem (and now the Stone Roses just came on, ironically enough), something of my time should be preserved outside history. The feeling of it. All times deserve that. This book is about that.

Good stuff. Now I have to shower. I'll be lucky if my next book is half as good.

August is a Hum of Crickets

2007-08-10T01:02:00.001-04:00

Back from the long wander around the Eastern Half of the United States and wondering where I'll be a month from today:

1) New York?
2) Chicago?
3) San Francisco?

Weird. It runs the whole country again. It's all I think about pretty much, besides ol' Snape and the Chicago Cubs. Oh my Cubs, they looked beautiful today - helped by Garrett Atkins and whoever was playing first for the Rockies - Helton or Baker?

But Lilly looked great again today, his expiration date is much later than I thought it would be - he might be the reason the Cubs are still in on it.

Boston was good - except for getting lost about twice a waking hour and the surprising heat. Swimming in Walden Pond was a definite highlight, as was looking out over the Atlantic and thinking about the 19th century.

Good article this week, or was it last? in the New Yorker about Bush's prisons - I think we're going to need a truth commission after this regime leaves much like the one in South Africa. We should probably learn what's been done in our name. I really have become more convinced over the last few weeks that this will actually be necessary.

Warmer weather...

2007-07-26T04:35:00.000-04:00

I can't stop listening to El Perro Del Mar's "God Knows (You Gotta Give to Get)," I like that, when a particular song is exactly what's necessary.

Wanted to run today, but never got around to it, it's been tough lately. It seems like there a million small things I want to do but never quite get to. Started reading Zazie in the Metro but the translation was terrible and distracting. So it might be time to go back to David Mitchell. I already feel like re-reading Cloud Atlas again, maybe just parts of it. I'd like to read his new one as well, and I promised myself I'd re-read Murakami this summer as well. And then there's Dumas and everybody else to re-read and read as well. Greene.

Sometimes I think about the stories we make up and I feel so good about what we seem to want, how we make all these beautiful structures of thought out of instinct and earth. It always leads pretty directly to the Greatest Lake and hope for faith.

I heard from a friend that Farley Granger has just published his memoirs and was at the Music Box the other day. I would love to read those too. That scene in Strangers on a Train shot through the glasses, so, so good. And the tennis scene. And Jimmy Stewart and him in Rope are so good, a really underrated Hitchcock, that one.

It's been a good year, all in all. I can't complain.

Asides and Quick Thoughts

2007-07-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

Perfect weather, days of it. It's hard not to think of them as gifts. I haven't been up to much in Chicago, but it's the calm in the storm these days.

The Cubs need this day off, it comes at a good time, rare that happens - but they were winding down and playing listlessly the last couple games, good pitching can do that, but Yesmeiro Petit is not exactly good pitching. I mean, from a major league standpoint. I'm sure he could put me back on the bench with a few pitches. Sometimes I think about that when I'm getting down on a player, these guys are pretty amazing at what they do, the least competent of them is more competent than anybody in the current administration at the job they do. I would take Caesar Izzzturis at his job over Mr. Bush at his job.

That's another thing that's been bothering me actually, this respect for office that's everywhere. I was reading this story about some Administration slob who was at a cook-out with Dick "Dick" Cheney, and Cheney approached him and said "Happy Birthday, how you feeling?" And the guy responded with something along the lines of "well, my hangover finally cleared up" or the like. And Cheney just kind of walked away and the guy worried about this for two days, thinking "I just told the Vice President I have a hangover, how stupid!"

Why?

Who the fuck is he? And I would ask the same question if I liked the man. And I despise him. But he's just another citizen, an equal. If he can't handle hearing about hangovers because he's too high up, then that goes against everything. There is no higher up. Not in this country. We needed a real revolution, a French one. I know that a lot has been argued about how radical the American Revolution really was, with Gordon Wood and others arguing it was really, really radical, and others like Zinn pointing out that the Revolution was co-opted pretty quickly by the wealth in this country who limited its growth. I used to side more with the Woods argument, but I've been coming over to this Zinn argument more and more as I watch and think about how slavish some people are about rank in this country. I think it's one of the reasons that calls for social justice in this country, for instance in New Orleans, end up being so muted. We might hear them, but there's no threat underneath them, there's no sense that anybody should fear those at the bottom. I think government has to first, respect the people it represents, and second, fear them. This administration, and I think no administration in a long time has feared the people and the last few, going back to Reagan, have not respected the people either.

I wonder if people really suffer that other people suffer? Clearly the bastards don't, and they were elected twice.

I read the final Harry Potter, finished it around six in the morning on Sunday. There were some intense moments - at a few junctures I had to walk around while I read it, and a couple times I had to put it down for a few minutes. There's a lot of talking about J.K. Rowlings prose style being a bit of a weakness. I think that might have been true in a few spots here and there earlier, but has been less and less the case going forward. And who cares anyway? If I want style, should I suffer through the boredom and lack of life that is Henry James? Style can be a crutch and a weakness just as easily as the reverse. And who draws more perfect characters right now, outside of Murakami? She traced archetypes out of archetypes, and that's not a small accomplishment. I'm going to re-read some Murakami and then go back to the Rowlings books. Maybe after a Graham Greene novel that I've been meaning to read as well. Graham Greene has become one of my favorites over the last couple years: there was a soul.

It's afternoon now, the cats are sprawled out on window sills and the couch; there's a breeze that falls about the room and the sun traces shapes through the curtains which rise and fall occasionally, like breath.

Leaving New York For A Spell...

2007-07-18T01:55:00.000-04:00

Back to Chicago after a blizzard of activity. Today I took at a dead run, and by the time I got to the teashop at nine, all I wanted to do was sprawl. Rudy was late and so I sat there and stared at all the people and thought about all the different things going on in this one little room. Then, after about three seconds, I let my mind go blank.

The day started at the school. I'd left my keys in the classroom the day before, which was dumb, school keys just sitting there for anybody to take. Luckily they were in a desk drawer I'd thrown them into while I was looking for some transcripts so no wayward and bored summer school student broke into my room to gain free-reign over the school. How dumb can I be though?

Very.

Forgetful too. I'm always losing words when talking to the studenten, talking to anybody. My brain is way ahead and I have to go back and find a word from the sentence before, that's what it feels like. In reality, I'm probably just distracted easily.

That (the keys-problem) slowed me down. I met Rudy at Times Square at two to deal with some certification issues and while waiting for him I saw this little girl get hit by a car. Really hit. Some idiot was gunning through 42nd and 7th, not the intersection to make an ambering yellow. The girl's father charged the guy and there was all kinds of insanity ensuing, meanwhile this homeless guy was trying to start a conversation with me about the book I had in my hand in preparation of asking for a dollar, which I did not have. Odd, a little girl sprawled out like that and right there another person thinking about getting a dollar, but need is need though I had nothing to give. Though I suppose the father was thinking murder, the mother stood over the girl and both were screaming over all the noise.

Tomorrow I have to get up early, run over to 12th and University, grab a van, bring it back, load it up and drive to Chicago then unload it and blissfully afterwards, sleep. But that's tomorrow still.

Walked all over New York today - down to Delancey and up to Tompkins Square Park, across to 3rd Avenue and then up to Union Square, then back to 1st Avenue and then home from Bedford. The hipsters were out, there'd been kickball at McCarren and everybody looked beautiful and slightly flushed.

Cleaned out a bit more of my room, put a bunch of my books in boxes to store down in Rudy's classroom, I loved looking at the titles and seeing how all these random books brought in on random Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the year ended up spelling out the classes I had taught. There's a summer school teacher there, and the room lacks the crispness it has when I have it. Sure the desk is empty, not cluttered and spilling over with papers and books and half-forgotten ideas for activities planned halfway, but the rest of the classroom, which I pride on it's neatness when I'm there looks kind of lazy and unfettered. It's not so bad I guess, who wants to have to deal with all that nonsense in summer. It makes me happy though, I feel like my room only unfolds into itself with me there.

I should sleep - six hours and then a long, long, long day.

I miss New York, and feel sad about missing out of seeing some people one last time. It's weird to not know if I'm coming back. I try not to take those things too seriously. Good-byes are usually overrated. If it is good-bye. I think the real good-byes are the best stories that you tell later.

New York is a kind of bible, everywhere pages and words grow out of pavement and metal. And life hangs over you and runs underneath you and pulses past you so that you are always caught up in the narrative that spills out everywhere around you. It gets so that waiting is the worst thing in the world to do, it's unbearable to think that New York happens without you, but comforting too, it's so easy to fall back into the stream which is really an ocean.

Just back from New Orleans in Brooklyn briefly...

2007-07-14T02:40:00.000-04:00

Turtles of New Orleans

Perfect weather today so it was a walk across the Williamsburg Bridge. I had a blister from New Orleans and all the walking there that re-opened, but whatever, it was too beautiful to care about things like that. Sometimes it looked like it might rain, but it never did and there was a perfect breeze while I watched a couple of freighters crawl up the East River. Next week I'll be back in Chicago for awhile.

New Orleans was amazing, and my favorite part was probably watching a thunderstorm come in across the Mississippi River. I love how the air feels right before a thunderstorm like that, and I love watching the river get all choppy and feel how everything, including the crickets - mostly anyway - go quiet.

Saw Harry Potter and was completely disappointed. The director couldn't direct and the writer couldn't write. Total let-down. Life went on - afterwards I had pecan pie that somebody holy made.

My writing is disjointed today - I have a million little things to do and catch up on before I leave for Chicago, so I feel like I should be getting to that stuff - but it's almost three a.m., maybe I just want to sleep?

Earlier today I saw Interview and it was pretty thought-provoking but I didn't like the last twenty minutes or so - they tacked on all this useless stuff that detracted from what was really the core of the idea of the film in order to make a point that was pretty whatever. Too bad, that.

I saw it at the Sunshine though, and I like it there - they have amazing chocolate bars from the Chocolate Bar on 13th and 8th...today I had the Chocolate & Key-Lime while I watched the movie. It was heavenly with the popcorn. So dinner was sparse.

Just finally read the Washington Post's series "Angler" on Dick "Dick" Cheney - typical but still horrifying. Sometimes I actually feel grief when I consider the American political system and the government it's destroying. And then I end up worrying about the earth. Something beyond amendments and freedoms being destroyed.

There were these awesome turtles in New Orleans - one of them, the guy that took care of them told me, he'd rescued at a Greyhound bus station: a kid was just beating on the shell trying to break it to see what would happen to the turtle and he just went and grabbed the turtle from the kid. For some reason I imagine a dusty field and a wooden and peeled paint station with people wiping their brows and looking down a broken road for the late bus, a hassled mother and an act of redemption, perhaps "For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens plays in the background. Those turtles were the best.

The porch at the Maison De Ville where the bed felt like a cloud.

I was all about walking and looking at trees.

I end up always taking too many pictures of trees...

Late at night...

2007-07-07T02:14:00.000-04:00

And I'm wondering where I'll be in two months.

Sometimes I worry about this, other times it doesn't seem real: the idea I could actually leave New York.

Today, walking, watching the sun fade into softness against the brown brick on 12th Street, I just thought there is no place so beautiful. But then I think about the rents and I just get annoyed.

Excited to be back in Chicago in a couple weeks, the idea of sitting back in Wrigley and watching mediocre baseball appeals strongly to the core of my being. That and re-reading Gide. I don't know why, but the urge to read Gide is strong these days. Him and Celine. All the French really. All the way back. Why the French? I think I've always liked French literature more than the average person. I remember first reading Zola, I couldn't believe somebody could write so boldly, this depiction of naked want really stunned me. Camus I owe eternal thanks to, he is the most beautiful soul to me. And Celine writes perfectly. I remember his writing like somebody told it to me. Dumas is a different kind of Shakespeare to me. And the poets are out of this world. I'll never forget first reading Mallarme, poetry took a different shape for me. I don't want to delve right now, because I need to sleep a little bit, but Gide was the first to make me want to see the desert.

The John Hopkins University

2007-07-06T14:06:00.001-04:00

What a piece of shit.

Fouad Ajami, a professor (and he has won prizes! They love to give each other prizes!) at the esteemed university I once thought seriously of attending, has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal attracting some attention in which he says of Bush's approach to morality: "the one defining mark of [his] moral outlook is the distinction [he is able to make(?)] between friend and foe," which really only illuminates how difficult it is to find something nice to say about Bush. Being able to tell the difference between friend and foe is something we expect of our five year olds, something we hope our presidents have managed long ago. As well, the action of marking friend and foe is only the beginning of a process to determine proper action and context of action for the self. In the Bush presidency, marking friend and marking foe involves a process that has typically led to great corruption and great heartache. We are not talking about Churchill here. Instead we are talking of roses for politically connected corporations and endless ache for others.

Now Ajami was writing this piece earlier and calling for Bush to pardon Libby. His piece, pedantic, insipid and superficial, went beyond straining the bonds of credulity however and entered the realms of the insultingly delusional. He wrote:

In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

How does one have the audacity or just the sheer stupidity to compare Scooter Libby to a soldier right now? How is he comparable? When soldiers in Iraq fall are they wearing custom tailored suits while being advised on their movements by lawyers who bill thousands of dollars an hour? Is the consequence of their falling an easy stretch in a minimum security jail? In another tack, was it a war that the White House was fighting in order to convince the American public that attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or any terrorism directed against the United States was the right move to make even as we invaded another more culpable foe? If it was then war, then are we accusing the Bush presidency, by application of this logic, of bringing civil war to the United States? An odd and idiotic defense of the indefensible.

Getting caught up in this part of his article is to miss the point elsewhere that this fool who has a koosh job in a comfortable university (a university started in much more a spirit of challenging established authorities when it was begun about 130 years ago which has clearly lost its way on that score) believes that Libby has sacrificed something out of a nobility of spirit in choosing to reveal the identity of a secret United States agent and obstruct the justice of the United States in the pursuit of a flawed and tragic policy that has not revealed anything of any nobility at all, but has just allowed the rotten fruits of this administration to smell more strongly in the light of the larger stage of war than they would have if Bush was simply giving the environment away (another thing he excels at).

Why do we suffer these fools so docilely?

How does Professor Ajami have a job when he so publicly reveals not just his ignorance, but an appalling lack of reason, intelligence or any sense whatsoever of a political philosophy that contains insight, distinction or foresight? He is an apologist. A flunky. Increasingly, our system of higher education rewards morons like this while the more original thinkers are included out of a process out of fear that those more original thinkers will reveal these flunkies for what they are: dangerous fools with no more right to pontificate and teach than the dogs they resemble.

So a big "Go Fuck Yourself" to The John Hopkins University and the lapdogs they hire for this pathetic and dangerous administration.

graduation and discussions about milk shakes

2007-06-28T14:48:00.000-04:00

I woke up thinking about snow. Different kinds of snow, how some was driven and how some floated. Took a shower and put on a coat.

Outside it is really hot today, but I figured it was graduation day and I should wear something with patches. The trains took forever and I sweat. Man did I sweat. Waited for a train, then another and another. Finally at Forty-second I just got out and took a cab.

"Turn on the air conditioner all the way," I said to the driver and he did. We had some laughs and I got out at Riverside Church up in Morningside, right by the Hudson. Everything was quiet, I was a little late. The kids were already getting ready to march.

A lot of applause, a lot of pictures. People saying things they were supposed to and the kids talking about Iraq - I was proud of them for that.

Getting home took forever but luckily I had some of my kids around for most of the journey. We discussed milk shakes and french toast - I made fun of them and vice versa. I'm going to take a nap now, but I wanted to make a little note, about how nice it feels to have a little time again.

quick notes...

2007-06-23T11:39:00.000-04:00

Until yesterday, this was a hellish week and another one, there seem to have been a lot lately, that I'm glad is over.

However, Houston was pretty brilliant, besides Houston which itself is the most boring town, kind of sprawled over area codes of wasted land so that California land-use looks almost reasonable in comparison, even the suburban sprawl that is the northern and western suburbs of Chicago look almost sane in contrast - though not really. Houston just rolls on and on into nothingness. But Texas itself is beautiful and an hour outside of Houston once to Galveston, things get prettier along the coast.

But I have to say, Minute Maid Park is an excellent place to watch some baseball after getting over the fact it's the Astros you're watching, and Arnab's wedding was out of this world beautiful.

And that was the whole point, right?

At school, the kids had their U.S. Regents Test, and it went marginally better than I was hoping, though I still had the worst passing rate I've ever had with a group of kids - it was at 70%, I was expecting more like 60 and usually get somewhere in the mid 80s, so I've mixed feelings about that - but the test itself is a pretty stupid idea created by people who believe these kind of things tell us something about individual students when really it only gives us an image of various schools in the most broad and unhelpful manner. In the end, all it does is punish individual students however and should really be scrapped.

In New York, education is completely politicized and ineffective, as well, education is seen only in discussions about schools, all the myriad problems that have a much larger effect on schooling are shunted off as being part of a larger, non-political series of issues that are in fact heavily political and simply spotlight how uncomfortable most Americans are about discussions of the impact of race and income on achievement, and this allows the huge corporately owened political system to get away with huge crimes against the health of the state as Jonathan Kozol and some of the other smarter people have pointed out time and time again.

Anyway, there were all kinds of adventures with City College that had to be dealt with as well and I'm sure there'll be more.

Otherwise, the Mermaid Parade is in a couple hours and Lewis is coming in for a brief visit, so I best be off.

Oh the Mermaid Parade!

Long week ends...

2007-06-09T00:05:00.001-04:00

Papers are done...today I wrote in yearbooks and had nothing to run and do after school - like endlessly read and write.

It was brilliant.

Hung out with Rudy and Ashlie - saw Oceans 13 which was ok, you know, Ebert put it best - the genius of yesterday decomposes into the routine of the present, or something like that - and it was true - but I didn't want to think.

New York was HUMID - damp even. But not too hot, so it was just uncomfortable. Students finish up next week - I don't want my seniors to graduate yet - I've gotten so used to them over the last two or three years.

Picked up the new Wilco album finally - curious to see how it is. Also picked up a Charles Brown collection - I used to like him when I was in college and Steve Kushing would play him on Blues Before Sunrise - which is the only radio show I ever went out of my way to hear.

Hillary Clinton is the Democratic George W. Bush...

2007-06-06T00:15:00.000-04:00

She can raise money. She can say the right thing to stoke the base...but when it comes down to it, the woman thinks of three things before she thinks about anything else:

1. How will this help me?
2. How will this help me?
3. How will this help me?

And her handlers think:

1. How will this help Hillary?
2. How will this help Hillary?
3. How will this help Hillary?

Bush got himself into a tragedy of his own design, not self-aware enough to be tragic himself, he made tragedy - because he can't answer the three questions with any kind of cohesive logic and so he allowed others to create the logic for him who then used that "logic" to pursue their own ends. But make no mistake, every move was choreographed and presented in a way to make George W. Bush feel that his interests were being served. Hillary at the very least, can create her own ends, but I am not excited by what ends she will pursue. Nothing will change on K Street, and those are the people who most need a one way ticket back to the festering hole they crawled out from - whether it be Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Messiah College.

She can look as confident as she wants and she can play politics. Great. So what? We've seen the end results of that Rovian game in spades. And it's not pretty, and it kills people. When the chips are down, she has failed everytime to accomplish anything of substance and I don't want her to lead my country. She's in bed with everybody I don't want to sleep with and her resorting to little nuggets of posturing and doubling back are the kind of flip-flopping I'm agaist. There is no mea culpa in her discussion of Iraq, there is no stepping up and flat out saying I did something out of politics rather than principle and that was wrong. While that wouldn't lead me to vote for her, it might make me consider her in the larger election when I have to choose between her, the crypto-fascist insane person the Republicans run and whoever the Libertarian is. She doesn't see her vote or that idea of politics before principle as wrong.

Sometimes it might not be so bad - you build a bridge where they don't need a bridge say...but you get something out of it - maybe your own bridge - maybe a promise to vote on your health care package - who knows, ok it's waste, but waste is not always evil...but when it's about the lives of literally millions, it is more than wrong. More than evil even.

It's unforgiveable.

And she has done nothing to suggest that it is an isolated incident, while nothing about her suggests that she represents meaningful change. She's Bush-lite with a law degree rather than a should-be-outlawed M.B.A.

She comes from the center rather than the right. And while those two things about her sadly represent real and measurable improvement, it represents much less than what we can find or what we need from out of these presidential candidates.

I hate the Republicans, but I refuse to support anybody who is as poor a candidate as she is. And the idea that she's won a debate simply by looking like something is stupid. And the media is moronicaly continuing with the fiction that appearance should be rated with more weight than substance.

Is this the media we deserve?

And if it is...what have we done to deserve it?

Ask around in Baghdad, I suppose...

What I spent another night doing...

2007-05-31T03:09:00.000-04:00

Le Corbusier dreams of Buenos Aires
* * *

Our enemies long for our retreat. They
question our moral purpose. They doubt
our strength of will. Yet even after five
years of war, our finest citizens continue
to answer our enemies with courage and
confidence. Hundreds of thousands of
patriots still raise their hands to serve
their country; tens of thousands who
have seen war on the battlefield volunteer
to re-enlist. What an amazing country to
produce such fine citizens.
– George Bush, 28 May 2007
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070528.html)

George Bush frequently chooses to define reality rather than acknowledge it when talking about American policy abroad, picking and choosing from reality's corners the statistics, beliefs and moments that spell out what is closest to his idea of what reality will be. In this he follows a high modernist tradition that James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, defines as a "claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment" (Scott, 93). George Bush follows a long line of American adventurers in foreign soil, all of whom tended to shower their purpose in language celebrating perceived American values such as liberty and uplift. Without these values, civilization withers and searches, Telemachus-like, for a father-state that might lead that more primitive civilization toward the light that is the modern future. As this idea gives meaning to attempted assertions of power in Iraq, so it did when the United States invaded and attempted to organize the Philippines. As I thought about American adventures in the Philippines and Iraq, I thought again and again of Le Corbusier, who, like these adventurers, insisted on a reality that heeded his definitions of what reality was, and who saw opportunities everywhere to remake landscapes in ways that denied meaning to the past in anticipation of the future. How different does he sound when he asks: "[h[ow many of those five million [those who came from the countryside to make their fortune] are simply a dead weight on the city, an obstacle, a black clot of misery, of failure, of human garbage?" (Scott, 116) from Arthur Stanley Riggs, a military officer and contributor to the Manila Freedom, who wrote during the American occupation in the Philippines, of Filipinos that they were "[b]arren to bleakness in literature, void of that finer feeling and sense of fitness which makes for a high conception of life and its possibilities to both individual and people" (Kramer, 198)? While Le Corbusier, commenting after the First World War, might not make as grand a distinction between whites and other races as does Riggs, they seem to share an idea that in planning society, nothing can be destroyed if it is broken to begin with. A policy of destruction to an entity that does not live up to the controlling power's idea of what a thing should be, following the line of reason established by Le Corbusier and Riggs then, is a policy of creation and thus any destruction in the pursuit of the creation of what the power wants is justified. When an American major in Vietnam claimed that it was necessary to destroy a village in order to save it, he was following a line of logic that had asserted itself long before he entered the arena and which basically asserted that any idea with force behind it is greater than any reality which only asserts the society it exists within. Fallujah then, is only the latest city to witness that the power to define means the power to destroy.

The United States has always defended its adventures abroad by clothing the goal of the adventure in terms like "liberty" and "progress." In the current conflict, Bush argued from well before war's start that the goal of the engagement was "not to conquer but to liberate" (), this sounds similar to the Thomasites' description of their tasks in the Philippines as teachers of the Filipino students as a project of "`regenerating' the islands and their people" (Scott, 170). The United States occupation of the Philippines, as much as it might have relied on the Filipino elite for legitimacy and support, relied still more on the language it chose to define its mission. Without the sense that this was not simply about the venture capitalists who descended on the meetings and ports of the Philippines, that it was not about the blind ambitions of empire, but was in fact an opportunity for the ideals of the United States to assert themselves in the fallow fields of the once unbelieving and still primitive (because they were not filled with the ideals yet that we could give them), then what meaning and effort could the newspapers and middle class give the horrific stories and deaths of so many Americans? Language was used to create mission and drape the mission in the language of sacrifice, heroism and virtue. While Filipino elites might decide certain local matters, the meaning, and hence the managing of the whole operation had to be tightly controlled by the Americans, for the meaning was not for the Filipinos, but for the Americans who would read about the Philippines and the Filipinos, volunteer to serve there and connect the meanings of that war to the meanings they had ascribed to the American creation of itself and its government, without necessarily granting that Filipinos were ready, or even worthy, of inheriting that mantle of democracy for themselves. American imperialism and occupation, perhaps less centralized in the Philippines than other forms of imperialism as practiced by the British or French elsewhere, or the Spanish there before them, in its form may have helped many Americans accept that the mission there, while having definite financial benefits, was really about something nobler and more necessary, as Christians might understand it, bringing light to darkness.

Definition and the right to define in the Philippines was tightly controlled, Kramer notes in The Blood of Government, any freedom of speech promised, would be severely limited, especially with the passage of the Sedition Act of 4 November 1901 (and perhaps this prefigured the shrill Espionage Act of World War One which limited speech by equating dissent with disloyalty and put Eugene Debs behind bars while he ran for president). With the Sedition Act, any subversive text could be suppressed, so that what emerged was an illusory unity of purpose of Filipino and American aims for the future of the Philippines. Like so many blue thumbs, pro-American Filipino newspapers gave Americans an image of a Philippines largely pro-American, with violence brought down on the process by so many savages and those, like the playwright Aureliano Tolentino, who would move others to "`meet together for unlawful purposes…[and] incite rebellious conspiracies and riots and to stir up the people against the lawful authorities" (Kramer, 177). It does not matter if the dissent is reality, the sedition act established those that ruled as the arbiters of truth and gave legitimacy to their version of reality, to further the appearance of their legitimacy, it was important to report that the truth emerging from American organs as to the Filipino situation were "experts."

How did experts establish their expertise? In the case of Dean Worcester, who came to be acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on the Philippines and who was quoted widely and acknowledged by institutions as entrenched as The New York Times as a respected expert on the Filipino, his "manners and habits" as well as the Philippines' "material resources, and its commercial possibilities" (17 January 1899, New York Times) one wrote. And wrote a lot. And defined, defined, defined. Kramer reports that Worcester "ranked `more than eighty distinct tribes,' from the `lowest' Negritos -- `incapable of civilization' – through the Moros, `pagan' Malyas, and `civilized' Malays" (Kramer, 180). He wrote articles, he wrote books, as well, and he was appointed to Taft's Philippine Commission to define what the Philippines offered and who the Filipinos were. He had credibility because, as The New York Times reported, he had

lived for years in the Philippines, hunted with the
wildest of the Moros and Sulus, attended their tribal
rites, and studied the political economy of the islants
at close range. he has written a book on the Philippines,
which is considered a standard reference work and
recently contributed an interesting series of articles on
the Philippines to The Century Magazine. (17 January 1899).

That he had traveled widely with Spanish sugar planters and government officials while learning about the Philippines and the Filipinos, that he had mostly stayed on estates while traveling did not receive consideration from The New York Times or those governmental officials. That he offered little pearls of wisdom such as "[t]oo much kindness [shown to a Filipino laborer] is very likely to spoil him…and he thinks more of a master who applies the rattan vigorously, when it is deserved, than of one who does not" (Kramer, 179), thus was not considered the voice of an ignorant and racist fool, but a voice to counter anti-imperialist arguments, for after all, it was an expert voice. That voice had hunted, it had counted and it had defined. It had earned the right to determine what the truth was. Much too, once upon a more recent time in certain circles, was made of the travels of Vice President Cheney to the capitals of the Middle East. His definitions too, served as the justifications for American policy in far away lands.

While the American policy of occupation in the Philippines does not, on the surface, have much in common with the work of Le Corbusier, as it was not necessarily centralized in structure, the spirit of the occupation and of imperialism in general makes itself apparent in his work. I found myself thinking about this quite a bit, wondering why Le Corbusier seemed to inform my sense of American occupation not just in the Philippines, but in Iraq as well. Finally I came to see the connection, it was faith.

Although I do not have the book in front of me, I remember reading Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. With its claustrophobic rendering of early 20th Century Paris, full of bad air, infection and violence and from there, Le Corbusier's insistence on what Scott calls "universal new standards for all buildings – standards that would cover lighting, heating, ventilation, structure, and aesthetics and that would be valid in all latitudes for all needs" (109) becomes something more than sympathetic, it is seemingly necessary. Cholera epidemics, revolutionary agitation, crime, small pox, alcoholism, lassitude, tuberculosis, prostitution, decrepitude, for many, these were not characteristics of some distant shore's hovel-filled cities, these were Paris, New York, London. If Paris was to be recreated, its streets widened, neighborhoods rearranged, if New York was to be a series of right angles and parks planned to the tree by Olmstead and Vaux, if London was to construct a subway of intersecting lines, was the idea of transforming Manila by wiping it clean really all that radical an idea? It was not even a new idea.

Le Corbusier saw the construction of things as exercises in central authority. Construction, he seemed to argue, was an organizing principle for a society and, as such, should emanate from some central source. He says of his plan for a centralized business development in Paris that "`[f]rom its offices come the commands that put the world in order. In fact, the skyscrapers are the brain of the city, the brain of the whole country. They embody the work of elaboration and command on which all activities depend'" (111). These commands were not to be made arbitrarily, nor in the heat of some political passion, instead he argued that the commands would come from

[T[he Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that
will provide your solution once the problem has been
posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony.
This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in
the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the
electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been
drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account
of nothing but human truths. (112)

In other words, Le Corbusier praises the rise of the expert. The expert however is who authority says it is, and authority in the Philippines argued that expertise was a province of those, like Dean Worcester, who named and defined the Philippines in a way that satisfied rather than challenged the desires of those who held the power to decide policy and planning. In occupied Philippines, strange, threatening and primitive in the sense that its structures did not reflect the current technologies and designs of the Western infrastructures, it must have seemed necessary to create a platform of Western design from which to plan the rest of the country and from which to destroy or marginalize those structures most in opposition to the uplift promised by the future, best represented by emerging technologies and current design practices as established in the chosen place. In other words, what existed against the Plan had to be destroyed in order to create the necessary city, the necessary village. This did not just mean buildings and roads in the Philippines, it meant populations and social organizations that failed to support or even uphold the values being ushered in from the United States. Power sharing might work on matters of local importance, but only in so far as it did not go against more national or international plans for what the Philippines were to be as defined by the United States.

The United States was able to justify such an invasive approach to occupying the Philippines because of how it racially and technologically defined civilization and savagery. In a letter to his wife summarized in the 28 April 1900 edition of The New York Times, Captain T. R. Hayson of the United States Army supposed that

the Filipino regards self-government and liberty simply
as avenues of escape from the duties and responsibilities
of organized social life. According to [Hayson], if the
United States leaves the islands, and no other foreign
power assumes control of them, in two or three
generations the natives will be indistinguishable from the
ordinary Malay savage. Yet Capt. Hayson speaks with
marked kindness of the Filipinos. He declares that their
personal habits are cleanly, though their village streets
and the surroundings of their houses are in a state to
explain fully the large amount of sickness from which
they suffer. The newly installed native officials, he regards
as honest and well-intentioned, but as to their competency
he has the gravest doubts. `The people have not,' he
concludes, 'the slightest conception of the idea of
government that derives its force from the consent of the
governed. And the duties of a citizen are to them an
absolutely unknown quantity. (28 April 1900, New York Times)

Hayson, in his assertions, supports the idea that the Filipinos, like the millions of unwashed Parisians Le Corbusier describes, must be led and taught by authority the subservient role they will play in the mechanization of the state or territory. The biggest difference, as mentioned earlier, is the racial component found in the American response to his mission in the Philippines and his attitude toward the Filipino. However, in their faith they are almost the same.

Hayson goes on to report, in the 28 April editorial that he believes that "when the light [of a government arising from the consent of the governed] does strike them, they will be a highly appreciative people, and make good citizens" (28 April 1900). When the Filipino is transformed into a new being, he will understand that what has been done to him and his country was good and necessary. However, if the Filipino were to remain what he is at present, then it follows, from Hayson's logic, that he will fail to be a good citizen. He must be transformed entirely from what he was. Le Corbusier, writing on reform had this to say, "`[w]e must refuse even the slightest consideration to what is: to the mess we are in now….There is no solution to be found here.' Instead, he insisted, we must take a `blank piece of paper,' a `clean tablecloth,' and start new calculations from zero" (Scott, 117). Uplift and liberty are found in disposing the past and the contemporary and creating a vision of the future that must be followed, and what does not follow that vision of the future must be destroyed. In this, Le Corbusier espouses a model for planning that was followed to such disastrous effect in the Philippines.

"`We claim,'" Le Corbusier said, "`in the name of the steamship, the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection'" (107). Promise and hope consumed Le Corbusier when he considered the future. Humanity, in approximating machines, promised to become less a mass of contradictions, inefficiencies, diseases and conflicts and would more or less distill with in itself a utopia of reason and right angles born of its technological advances and appropriation of machine logic and design. As Scott notes, Le Corbusier

returned repeatedly to the contrast between the
existing city, which is the product of historical chance,
and the city of the future, which could be consciously
designed from start to finish following scientific
principles. (111)

For many Americans, the Philippines represented a similar opportunity to re-make the world and bring uplift of a sort to a people imprisoned in the darkness of savagery. Perhaps these Americans, like Hayson, did not necessarily believe in the steamship, the airplane and automobile, but they did believe that principles like free speech, democracy and free enterprise represented the path to modernity, true religion and economic well-being. Other Americans may have gone along for the ride, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by American occupation, but it was the believers, like Hayson, who allowed American institutions and people believe in the occupation of the Philippines.

The reality of the Philippines was less abstract, perhaps, than Le Corbusier's conception of uplift and advancement, and the end results hoped for were not quite as utopian, which is why the racial component may have been so necessary in explaining the narrative of the occupation of the Philippines by the United States. Whereas in Le Corbusier's vision, the result would be heaven, it was understood by people in the United States reading about the Philippines that the Philippines could never be quite so free as the United States. After all, they were more primitive, racially than Americans were, the thinking went, so it was not a utopia hoped for, however, in creating a vision for the future of the Philippines in which it was hoped the people would advance, learn and gain deeper understanding of what would be more successful action by them, occupation and profit were justified to a large enough percentage of the populace that those with much to gain, were not kept from doing so, no matter the cost in human life for the Filipinos or the other Americans, who gained nothing from the adventure. What Le Corbusier and planners and commentators on the Philippine occupation have in common, is a sense that government is going to transform society, in Iraq there seems to be no such thing. Current United States policy in Iraq seems to ignore any possibilities of real government. Any sense of management in Iraq by non-military agencies are so obviously more concerned with the private interests of massive multi-national corporations than any destiny or purpose to be created in Iraq that the cynical enterprise cannot be accepted by any other population than the most hard-core believers in U.S. exceptionalism

Quick notes before writing...

2007-05-30T19:40:00.000-04:00

Hot today, felt weak. Hints of getting sick mingled with allergy and fatigue to make me very conscious of my body in a way I don't like. I wanted to just find a comfy bed and read some Alexander Dumas, it seems like we should have eternity to read Dumas, it really sounds like heaven to me: a comfy bed and big old baggy 19th Century novels of adventure. Maybe some mint iced tea near enough.

I feel better now, I think I was just allergic to school today. Man, I did not want to be there. I would look out at my classes and think, "man, I don't want to think about this stuff, I just want to sit in a back yard or at some cafe and watch the world go by." But they kept popping up in the classroom every forty-five minutes or so and I'd have to start over and act like I was in better shape than I was.

But then, suddenly, in p.m. school, just kind of talking about identity and image, I looked out at them and thought, you guys are totally cool. And then I wasn't in a hurry anymore. I thought about how pretty soon I would give them up to the world, they'll forget my name in a year or two and that'll be that.

It bothers me that more people don't like big, baggy novels. Why is finishing the point? I think depth is the point.

I should start writing the damn papers now. Maybe I'll check baseball really quickly first.

Lame Democrats; Soon to Columbus

2007-05-22T19:12:00.000-04:00

I don't understand how George Bush continues to get everything he wants. Like some kind of horrible infant everybody now realizes they don't like but still give candy, stuffed giraffes and gift certificates to Chi-Chi's to, he continues to get free reign, dead soldiers and citizens and the run of the U.S. Government. Instead of passing an even more rebuking bill for the president and making the case that it was him and not them letting the soldiers down, which should be a pretty easy case to make at this point, the dundering weak-kneeds of the rubber chicken circuit end up looking foolish, indecisive and driven by nothing other than a desire to whine that it shouldn't be this way.

I wasn't expecting much more, but it's depressing nonetheless.

I showed The Grapes of Wrath and Golddiggers of 1933 today in class - clips, some of the kids, their eyes glaze over, they start doing math homework, something they would never ever otherwise do or they start looking at whatever's on the wall; but a few really get into it, make the connections you hope for and at least once a class bring up something that surprises me - so I like movie days. But I get embarrassed with both of these movies because I love them, and if the kids say stupid things I really want to yank them out of my class and not see them for awhile. But of course, I'll see them in the hall even if I did kick them out, so...easier to show things that are instructive but not loved. But I love the little Soviet-style montage sequence with the tractors in Grapes of Wrath because you know John Ford, right-winger that he was, had so much fun doing that, and Henry Fonda is so good, and the lighting is out of this world and so often creeping and malingering - it's beautiful. And Golddiggers, with that last Busby Berkeley number is so brilliant and picks up on all the dread and sense of lost promise that was 1932/'33. So good. So if some kid is sitting there gleaming a cube, or whatever passes for trig with algebra these days, I want to rip it up.

After school today I walked through McCarren Park - the leaves are so lush this year - it's great! Two B61s went down Bedford as I walked, an all-time record. The day is kind of floating into evening, the air is just a little crisp, rounded on the edges though so that it's comfortable. The Cubs are in San Diego tonight - it feels like San Diego here...

Thesis and etc.

2007-05-06T01:08:00.000-04:00

I ignored the beauty today. Soft breezes, puffy clouds full of monsters and automobiles, streets cluttered with other people enjoying the sunshine and the sudden appearance of full-on spring.

I was writing the damned thesis.

Oh boredom! How boring you were! I read an article or two, futzed around, thought about how much I hated this stuff, thought about clouds with faces and dragons in them.

Sang songs.

Thought about the perfect mixed tape. What I would include, what I would regret not including and what I would be annoyed with the most, long-term, for having included.

I ate well. Listened to the Cubs game, checked my email about every twenty minutes. Nobody wrote because everybody was outside.

Tonight I saw Spiderman. Lame. Too much soap, not enough action. The bad guys were made out of cardboard, and who cares what exactly old Peter Parker and Mary Jane are going through? That's the story we know about. What it goes through and how it ends.

Give us more of the other stuff, the stuff that takes some imagination and some risk.

I don't ask too much from my Hollywood, but it would be nice if they would say, "you know, we invested a lot of money in this. Let's not make a piece of shit."

$250 million later there it is: a piece of shit.

But the walk home was beautiful. The breeze was strong and the moon was bright behind the fast-moving clouds. From Brooklyn the city looked like a zenith of happenings and the delis, with the fruit stands outside and semi-desolute, looked like something from a Henry Fonda film.

Whatever that means.

More work tomorrow. Always that these days.

I've had all kinds of songs going through my head today. It's been hard not to sing just all the time today.

The Bush Veto

2007-05-02T14:30:00.001-04:00

Why on earth are the Democrats confused?

The first thing they need to do, is craft a spending bill that is clear, to the point, resolute in deadlines and how much should be spent, Again. They need to make sure that within the bill is more than adequate funding for the soldiers presently in Iraq.

Then they need to speak about how this is a record, a record for the American people to examine in two years time to see exactly how gutless or clueless their representatives were and vote accordingly. They need to ask these politicians if they are loyal to an idiot/man-child president and his Iagoish vice, or to the idea that this war of manipulated information, outright lies and no apparent purpose other than to attempt to support the misbegotten ideals of a small and priviledged minority within the U.S. Government? And they need to ask, is this not supporting our troops, asking they be brought home?

The gutless wonders, worried about being portrayed by Karl Rove or whatever next emerges from the ooze of the plutocracy in an attempt to define them as "liberal" and "friends of the terrorists" will vote against their own beliefs. The bill will lose.

They will worry about being mis-portrayed as not funding and supporting "our boys," as those who have no qualms about throwing them into needless danger like to call them:

"Oh, yeah, we've been sending our boys into this place we set fire to. Then we send our other boys into the fire. It's cool. Yeah. The boys seem to like it, some of them. Yeah. Our boys are definately a credit to the nation, and not supporting their entrance into the fire is unpatriotic. You can go to hell for that. I mean they're in fire, what are you supposed to do? Not support them? We don't have any hoses. So we just kind of stand out here and cheer, and puff our chests out and talk about "the great sacrifice" "our boys" make. Sometimes we get emotional. Like on holidays."

Do Americans really feel that opposing this group is really opposing "our boys"?

Let the bill lose, pass some bill written by the devil because you helped bring the devil in, and then really start pushing for partition. Go somewhere where the Democratic Party has a chance to take the lead. Start insisting on talking to Turkey, to start talking to Iran, to start talking to Syria, to start talking to Israel and start creating what the future is going to be. Start talking about political deals to create new borders to undo what the British did when they were doing what were doing now.

Start talking to the Iraqi politicians who are going to have to be architects on this mess.

And then start giving our soldiers a real mission in a role that helps bring about partition. Baghdad will have to be Berlin.

See if we can deal with this new France and this new Germany to put some pressure on Turkey and to also offer them some reasons for going along. Swallow some crow.

Fix this.

Quick notes...

2007-04-25T01:36:00.000-04:00

Arrived in the rain to Las Angeles Friday morning, everything there goes green when the rain hits and it was beautiful and fun to watch all the cautious drivers, suddenly, in the rain.

I went out to Venice to visit and look around to see how everything is changing, it didn't look quite as run down, but the boardwalk still looked like something out of a Bazooka Joe comic. The waves were loud and the hills in the distance still seemed like impressive things when imagining the Spanish boats that must have crawled up and down the coast hundreds of years ago.

I drove to Vegas to see Arnab and Mac, there were a lot of Arnab's other friends as well, they gambled a lot, I watched them gamble. I gambled a little.

Mostly I walked around, I watched all the old people coming up from Arizona, and all the other people from California and Iowa running around looking to be entertained. It was what it always was, fun for 36 hours and then time to head for the hills.

Mac still makes me laugh, and I love how class conscious he is, and how quick he is to deflate bloviated pompousity. I drank quite a bit of sake, and found some good stuff. I don't drink too often these days, and hardly ever sake, but it seemed to be what everybody was drinking, besides vodka tonics, and to be honest, I think vodka tonics are what people drink when they don't really know what they like.

Then it was back to Los Angeles. More rain, it almost felt like San Francisco, which made me homesick for a place I haven't been in years now. The lights from the hills in the night reflected the same way in the same chilling rain. Fog rolled in and waves crashed, the beaches were empty save some addicts and teenagers looking for a place to make out. I liked looking at all the things the ocean brought to the land. The waves would sometimes run up the shore, soaking my all-stars so that my socks got wet and uncomfortable. I thought of something John Straight told me about wool and how it doesn't get cold when it gets wet.

Coming back to Brooklyn I thought about how I needed to start packing, how I had to write, read, move, record and apply and it all seemed pretty overwhelming. But spring is here now, and the breeze was beautiful, I fell asleep pretty quickly and didn't wake up until late, and then I stayed up deep into the night, not doing anything more meaningful or useful than catching up on all the baseball I had missed.

I'll put up some pictures next time. It's time to sleep.

Vonnegut

2007-04-12T01:48:00.000-04:00

"To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Reading Bluebeard was one of the great pleasures of my life. Slight really, and not nearly as visionary as some of his other books, it carried a grace through it that I thought the author might have if you happened to catch him, on a nice day, with some time to kill. It was a book, in the end, on the virture of kindness, among many other things you could say about it.

Slaugherhouse-Five is something beautiful. It insists, like the best of Twain, on a moral order founded on the ability to scorn what a particular culture might, at any one time, hold up as an ideal of itself.

There was no pretense about Vonnegut. He wrote urgently and without the stink of academe. He had no use, as Orwell didn't, of any words that sought to do anything else than tell exact things. If one loses that exactitude, it becomes too easy to lie, or to say easy things.

Vonnegut never did that. He was brilliant and generous.

New York Again

2007-04-11T23:39:00.000-04:00

First period - there's Mr. Johnston in the corner.

The studenten were back. I knew it would be an ok day when I got to push Clifford against a wall on my way in and demand his lunch money. I threw some pennies at Daniel and Shaira and got very excited while I was talking about Samuel Gompers.

Fifth period we looked at some newspaper articles I found from December, 1937 - a brutal month. Nanking alone, but the Nazis beating the hell out of the Jews, the fascists in Spain and the continuing problems of the Depression at home along with the various other et ceteras that are omnipresent, I also got excited talking about all this, and the studenten were not horrible. I'm not saying it was a brilliant class, but when the fifth period can kind of hold its own, be recognizable as a place of potential study, then the day's not wasted. Rare.

AP Government practiced some questions and we went over them, for some reason, when somebody asked a point about Federalism I really got into it and moved the discussion toward Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase and the fragility of ideology, I wanted to talk about all kinds of things, my mind was all over the place, but it's always a quick class. I want to get on Kelvin a bit, as he's coasting. So is Catherine, come to think of it...

After school, teaching the literature class, there were about forty or forty-four students, and we went over some poems. I felt they did a good job with some of the stuff and they were really discussing each other's writing pretty well. So getting back to school wasn't awful. One of my kids joined the marines, I have to admit, I felt for him, he wasn't into the idea of joining the marines, but what else is he supposed to do he asked? He said when he was signing up there was another guy there who was being promised to have his police record expunged if he joined up. He said it was odd to think about what the government can do for you if it wants to, if it has a reason to, and odd to think of what it can do To you if it wants to, if it has a reason to. We were talking about surprising or sudden thoughts we'd had over spring break.

It makes me sad just thinking about it.

Ashlie and I went to the movies, she'd been at the library on 42nd so we met at Union Square, we talked some more about her job. It really is time for her to move on from that blight. We got to the movie way early, and so we stared north up toward Union Square, and for some reason, it really did look beautiful today, even in the gathering grayness that turned to drizzle by the time I walked home.

I also talked to the Beej today, my godson has some weird little infection, it's nothing horrible, but potentially, apparently, it could be, so they all had to take chlorine baths (cholorine? I don't know...). I was horrified, but he said there's just a little chlorine (sp?) in the baths, but he also has to use anti-bacterial swabs in his nose every once in awhile. Odd that.

I've been reading mostly at books for the classes, but I'm really curious about this book I found at the Strand yesterday - that sounds so New f'n York that I hate it, but whatever - it's a book about New York in 1946 and that just seems filled with all kinds of potential brilliance. It's about this guy who escorts a "dame" home, and then she's killed by his boss and the boss tells him to go and find the guy who saw her home. Properly seedy, it's supposed to be brilliant. Many books are.

I'm just going to throw this out there - we saw Firehouse Dog today - it was the only movie playing there at a decent time and I like dogs a lot, so Ashlie was a total martyr-angel, but you know, as bad as it was, when I was about eight, I would have been all about this movie, except for the sunglasses on the dog - even at eight I think I would have been thinking "kid, you're trying to hard, bring it down a notch" - yet at thirteen I probably was trying that hard myself. Anyway, Jules et Jim or Wild Strawberries it was not, nor was it Because I Said So however.

This is pretty all over the place, but it was also odd, today, before the after-school class (Credit Recovery Program - really), I was reading a bit and kind of thinking about the poetry, things I wanted to ask them, mostly I was looking at this Randall Jarrell poem, I hadn't read him in a few years and I was enjoying looking at a few of his poems there and then I thought of Karl Shapiro's "Auto Wreck" with that great first line about the silver bell beating and then suddenly, there was this brave mouse running around my room, right up to me almost. It had been awhile since I'd seen a mouse, but this guy, I don't know if he was hungry or what, he was all over the place. Floribel, this student who came to visit and wait for her friends to get out of lab, was not amused. The other girl who was in there, Kraehl, she just kept reading, I don't even know if she looked up.

Another one of my girls is pregnant, she said to her friend right before class - "look at me being dumb again," which sounds kind of slight, considering, but her voice was so intense, so filled with absolute belief and self-disgust. Then she read about her surprising thought to the class, which was "how do we know we all see the same shade when we look at a color?" I've thought about that one too.

"Were you in the shit?"

2007-04-09T02:11:00.000-04:00

I think I'm going to have to watch Rushmore again soon...

I love the churches in Milwaukee

2007-04-07T03:02:00.000-04:00

I left my camera in Brooklyn. I can see where it is in my head, right next to the desk on the second shelf in the corner, just below the shoebox with the shoehorn and all the tax papers from last year in it.

Today Milwaukee felt like late October or early November, everything gray, the wind blowing across the choppy endless water of Lake Michigan. I love Lake Michigan so much, it looked like the past today.

I went to see the Cubs play the Brewers, left a day's work on the damned thesis (today it would have been the lit review) and ignored the fact that my computer suddenly won't run iTunes without crashing. Who needs it when Soriano is leading off and Rich Hill is throwing curve balls that hang on a string and then drop to the earth like so many anvils. It was good to be away from Chicago and New York, where I am all the time it seems, even if it was just 85 miles north.

I love Milwaukee because the churches jut out at all angles toward the sky, they are the skyline really. I mean, there's this kind of half-assed thing of a skyline just off the Lake, but coming up 94 you know you're in Milwaukee when you start seeing these beautiful silhouettes that are especially beautiful against a fading gray sky.

It made me want my camera but it's in my head pretty good. It was there even before I got there, but I liked that it didn't disappoint, that view of the city.

Yesterday I saw Adam for dinner on Milwaukee and Kimball back in Chicago. We talked a bit about baseball and he said he enjoyed the idea of it, the narrative and strategy of it, but not necessarily watching it. He likes to listen to it when he gets home from the hospital, a break from NPR. Meanwhile, for me, or for some others I know, watching it is a great pleasure. I have always felt that there is an exactitude in baseball well-played that is even more precise than poetry, and because it is so exact, when it slips, it surprises, creates tension and devolves into narrative. But narrative is also satisfying. As well there are so many ways to define baseball, so many different levels on which to measure it, that it can be approached from infinite directions and lead into many different kinds of thoughts, so that it is also endless replicable as an event. Baseball is an infinite crossroads. I think this more than other sports, more so than most things.

I feel that way about the Crusades too I guess.

I have to go back to New York on Monday, not really ready for that. I need a few more days just to work and get my brain back together. It's been a long year and the last couple months are going to be even tougher. Mostly I want to be back in San Francisco for awhile, and just walk up and down all the hills and end up in half-remembered neighborhoods. Instead, I think I'm going to start running again.

It's something.

on Dower's Embracing Defeat

2007-03-26T18:31:00.000-04:00

Democracy Best Served – On a Couple Chapters of Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower

Reading what Dower has to say about military tribunals in Embracing Defeat helps to underscore similar traps in thinking made by makers of U.S. policy elsewhere while at the same time revealing leaps in logic made by MacArthur’s staff that helped, perhaps, the United States to gain the outcomes it wanted in Japan. Nowhere is there an attempt to create a high modernist, Le Corbusier-like vision of Japan, rather the goal is instead to create a stable U.S. partner that will support U.S. policy in the Pacific.

The idea of what might be able to happen in Japan is no less radical however than what neo-conservatives imagined for Iraq: a complete transformation of government and, to a certain extent, a transformation of how the people there are expected to think about concepts like freedom and government. After all, what we claim to have wanted Iraq to become, a stable democracy and friend to U.S. interests in a strategic region of the world is similar to what we seem to have worked for in Japan.

In the tribunal for Japanese war crimes, the United States determined ahead of time what it was that was going to be given as information and judgment, both to the participants and to the observers. Tojo was given an idea of himself to convey in the court in order to spare his own vision of the emperor’s position in the new Japan as well as to satisfy his idea of duty. Thus the United States co-opted Tojo’s pain and sense of loss at the conclusion of the war and used it as a way of to define what Japan had been and what it was going to be there at the tribunals. When he did stray from the path, Dower reports on page 325, it was the American-led prosecuting team that made sure Tojo connected his statements back to the American thread of what the war was. In the end, the Americans completely controlled what was going to be said. On the same day the New York Times reported Hirohito “denied” his divinity (1 January 1946), it also reported that “History Teaching in Japan [is] Brought Under Allied Ban,” and that “the suspension of teaching of Japanese history, geography and morals by Japanese schools was ordered…by Allied Headquarters.” The past written in terms approved by the Americans would not only dictate to the former military of Japan what he was to say, it would dictate to every Japanese school child what history was in the attempt to make a Japan a place where “democracy [was] best served” (327). Tribunals were another place, a key place, where democracy would have to best served. Everywhere there are U.S. generals in Dower’s study, there lurks underneath their words, and sometimes directly in their words, a sense that the eventual enemy is much more important than the past enemy, and the eventual enemy is communism.

Any deviation from the U.S. program put all our interests in danger. Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, a close assistant to General MacArthur wrote privately in a letter to a Japanese official in the imperial court that the “’frequent mention of the [Emperor’s] [potential] abdication in the American press [is alarming].’ Such an act, he declared, ‘would be a victory for all Communists and especially the Russians who hold it is naïve to claim that Japan can be democratized so long as the Emperor remains on the throne’” (p. 328). Much like in today’s climate, policy-makers agonized over every report and every incident, seeing in them the seeds of defeat for their programs and their aims and the potential ascendancy of a great and terrible authoritarian monster. The word “communism”, like the word “terrorism” tended to put a damper on debate and to fix the policy makers were tunnel vision.

In the Japanese trials, the desires of the United States to fix a certain policy for Japan melded with the accuseds’s desires to fix a certain idea of the Emperor’s character so that their vision of part of Japan’s future might remain intact, the Americans were able to use this to suit their purposes in creating an idea for Japan that supported their program for Japan. In Iraq the tribunals have been just as manipulated but not nearly as passive as the United States would have liked to see. Sure every time another member of the Bush White House is found to be officially incompetent, corrupt or both, we quickly hear about a confession or another finding of the tribunals nominatively under Iraqi government control, an idea of punishment is meted out but it has no coherence, no seeming authority because it has been so patchwork and because the voices of those in the courts is so discordant and antithetical to the U.S. message. There is no compatibility in visions for the Iraqi future or in ideas about what certain leaders are to marry with a mutually compatible statement. The resulting noise is discordant and reveals rifts at all levels of Iraqi planning.

The ultimate end of U.S. policy in Japan appears, from an outsider and definitely no expert on Japanese post-War history (I’m speaking of myself here), to have been successful. It is perhaps useful here though to mention a connection I saw drawn between Yukio Mishima and Arab suicide bombers in the February, 2004 issue of The Believer. Mishima had been celebrated by the Japan Romantic School writers during World War II, and this was a school that ardently supported the idea of the Emperor as divinity and swore allegiance to that divinity and the nationalism it inspired in them; after the war Mishima turned his back on them and appeared to have completely modernized; his novels seem to fit into the more open sexuality of the Kasutori culture, though it also transcended it. However at the end of his life, he turned his back on the previous quarter century of his life, and in front of a collection of troops and a captured general, committed suicide for his Emperor. One wonders, even at its most successful, just how successful outside cultures can be in re-shaping the interior lives of other cultures? It is in that interior re-shaping, ultimately, that the United States has most interested in sculpting in its foreign adventures. In Iraq that has meant blood and heartache. In Japan, it led to some moral confusion, and was ultimately adapted by the Japanese to their own advantages and uses.

rain and thesis

2007-02-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

Back in New York with clouds that sit on the ocean, gray and damp like a lonely afternoon commute and it's not even four.

I've been taking some notes for my little master's thesis, this involves writing down random thoughts and making playlists for writing down random thoughts. It also involves tomato soup, a quick run to the deli and phone calls in which I talk about what I'm not writing down.

I already feel like a movie. Something to stare at. I'm eager though, to start some of Mary McCarthy's writing about the Vietnam War. I have The Seventeenth Degree just sitting on my bedside table, right above some Dumas, which I've almost started dreaming about, Dumas to me, means time to sit and read and get lost: there's no better author for that.

They almost ruined reading for me, the bastards, but then, thankfully, I found the 18th Century, and there was Gibbons:

"A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

Somewhere, in about three notebooks, I have that written down, and came upon it again just a bit ago in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I have always felt, culturally, that we reflect the 18th Century quite well. Even our geniuses have the same broadness in approach, there is not the intensity of the 19th Century very often, at least not since Gatsby and Holden, in character, but there is in idea. I suppose I'm thinking of Borges mostly, because he is so good. But also in DeLillo, Kundera, Abe, some of the others who I don't like enough to mention. Usually when there is an intensity in character in novels, there's a pretty direct connection to the author and not necessarily to any abstract idea of the author. These are generalities and could easily be argued. I'm thinking here of Bukowski, Exley, Roth and Munro.

Like the 18th Century, this is definately not an age of poetry, which is reserved to being an afterthought and firmly in the hands of the deadened and deadening academy, may they rot in hell. Walcott, Heaney and the bastards all. Tedium in poetry is like a chaperone on a date. Any chance of anything interesting happening is lost to a sea of predictability and safely navigated destinations.

Anyway, how did I get here? Ah yes, a little more work on the thesis!

hangin' at the airport...again.

2007-02-20T16:34:00.000-05:00

How I hate flying. And sitting at airports. We're sitting here because they can't find pilots, so I suppose one doesn't have to look too far to figure out why the airline companies are held together financially by string, wires and prayers. The plane will be full now, and uncomfortable, I hate them for this. Why can't one thing be easy right now?

Leaving Chicago is never fun. The Lake, driving around, space. New York swallows you up, sometimes it's easy to forget you haven't strayed out of about twenty square blocks in a week, but then, who notices really?

I don't have much else I'm thinking about. Watching the Libby trial, it's funny to hear the same Republicans who were so breathless about perjury a few years ago get just as huffy proclaiming that it's just perjury now. I guess the whole lying to kill hundreds of thousands of people doesn't really measure up to a blow-job.

Odd how we get so excitable over sex. It's competitive, and it seems like we should be beyond that at a certain point.

dissent and its effects

2007-02-13T13:54:00.000-05:00

So John Boehner of Ohio teared up today listening to a fellow Republican congressman describe what it was like being a POW in Vietnam. The unaptly named Sam Johnson said hearing about the protests back home made him angry back then. Apparently he still gets a little steamed; this is the same Sam Johnson who referred to another veteran of the war, John Kerry, as "Hanoi John" simply for speaking out against the Vietnam War after serving there. The same Sam Johnson who said when the current administration couldn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, well then: “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ‘em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.” A nuclear bomb is, I suppose, the ultimate "shut up!"

Dissent is important, it's sad that this even needs to be said. We can't make up the truth and we dishonor the truth by ignoring it in favor of what we want the truth to be. Is there an argument over whether we believe that the truth is important?

It is only in the idea that truth is not an important consideration in creating a rationale for continuing escalation in Iraq, or, at this point, even action, in Iraq, that a case can be made for escalation there. And it is only by this rationale that truth is meaningless in creating policy that we should stop arguing about what to do in Iraq. Arguing is necessary, it is integral to democracy. Don't we all understand this? Shouldn't what is happening in Iraq be the foundation of our debate about what needs to happen there? And at this point, when it is so clear that U.S. policy in regards to Iraq has failed, shouldn't we be strident in our objections to the prosecution of this war?

Telling somebody to shut up because it might hurt soldiers' feelings when you're arguing that those same soldiers should face bullets and the other person says they shouldn't face bullets is the epitome of missing the point. Doubly so when you are defending a failing policy out of loyalty to a party and its cause, not to the troops themselves. Sam Johnson argues against demoralizing the troops, I am arguing against killing the troops in the pursuit of a policy that is failing and, as presently conceived and executed, will continue to fail. This is not about who gets picked last in kickball, this is about the willingness of a state to eat the lives of its young for empty ideals built on corruption and rhetoric.

To say nothing of the numbers of Iraqis who have died and continue to die. Does Mr. Boehner ever, perhaps, tear up thinking about the collapse of Iraq following our invasion. Does he ever perhaps, shed a lonely tear over the birth of this violence in the wake of our inept policy? Or is it only thinking about hurt feelings and wounded pride? I have no trouble supporting soldiers and I believe, in large part, that our soldiers are attempting to do good works, but I also have no trouble in pointing an accusing finger at this administration and those who support them and asking them a simple question: "to what end to you put these lives on the alter?"

"How loyal are you to these soldiers' lives?"

As Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Death of a Soldier":

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is not absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

They would pretend that death means something besides death, in Iraq, it does not. It rarely does.

Finally, the arguing that terrorism is a police problem, most effectively handled by policing methods is not akin to "giving the terrorists a blank check" or other such nonsense; it is arguing, simply, that there are better ways to handle the issues of terrorism, Islamic fundementalism, closed and open societies and other various issues than the ways now being pursued to continuing disaster as state issues to be decided across huge borders all at once.

Another Samuel Johnson, confronted with the idea that perception is all and that nothing is knowable so there is no objective truth, that is Berkeley's idealism, refuted it very simply. He kicked a stone and said "I refute it thus!" We need to kick more stones when we talk about Iraq and stop talking about what we dream Iraq should be. So late in the game, why does it always come back to this?

decided?

2006-11-08T21:38:00.000-05:00

It was odd wondering if the Dems had managed to get the Senate today...I wanted that judiciary stuff out of Republican hands. So it's good, a little bit.

If you feel like gloating, rushlimbaugh.com is mighty funny today.

Some days it's easier to laugh about the slow slide of the world, a piece of ice breaking into a teeming sea, than other days.

Like knowing that President Ass Face and his wily companions won't be able to ram another Alito down our collective craws.

That's something at least.

election...

2006-11-08T07:35:00.000-05:00

Isn't it odd...right now, a big hunk of the next two years is going to come down to about 4000 people spread out in Virginia and Montana. Still, the Democrats have done way more than I thought they would. Tennessee rejected Gore in 2000 to put the Republicans over the top, and now I hope that ignoring Ford in 2006 won't keep the Republicans on top.

I wonder how the Democrats will do now that they have at least one House, and maybe the whole Congress. For instance, on civil liberties, will they kow-tow so they can't be branded "weak" on terrorism, even though all these steps do nothing really to prevent terrorism?

What about being "soft" on democracy?

Well, this went better than I was letting myself hope.

on torture films, Borat and a few other political quibbles...

2006-11-05T21:50:00.000-05:00

The L Train was only running to Lorimer again this weekend, it was impossible to make it down to the station because of the surge of people constantly making their way up to the buses that would take them the rest of the way home. It's like this most weekends, except those weekends they just shut down the L, but the mayor, the MTA, you know, they're doing a good job. It would be nice if we held people accountable occasionally.

At some church that fills up like a last place NBA team's arena, some minister talked about his sexual sickness and had his job taken away from him. Most of his followers seem to blame Satan for this, Satan or Bill Clinton I suppose. Before long it'll be Nancy Pelosi, they're already trying to scare each other about her. Take a look at rushlimbaugh.com sometime, and you'll see the character assassination already well underway. Of course, I suppose we shouldn't mention his Viagra-ridden Dominacan trip when discussing matters of character. After all, I'm not saying he went down there to have sex with 16 year olds like many of the middle-aged American men who go down there, after all, it's a strictly economic arrangement even if he did.

It seems sad to me, these hotel rooms with reluctantly gay Republican and yahoo-Christian backgrounds nervously getting it on with men who cheerlead them on toward a real orgasm. Looking at Haggard's male escort's ad, where it says "hey, I'm a nice guy!" it was almost heartbreaking to imagine Haggard nodding to himself, thinking "I'm going to do it!" Sex shouldn't be so fucking sad like that. Grow up. And then Crist, down in Florida, having to meekly dodge gay questions everywhere he goes because if he admits he's gay he'll probably lose. What's there to lose when you're losing your self-respect every day? I feel the way Nietzsche felt about beggars when I think about these guys. It's annoying to even think about them because it arouses such feelings of revulsion and pity mixed with disgust at their absolute inability to deal with the world of truth. Their attempts to make a world that stands at moral attention forever, a world in which they may forgive themselves by condemning others, well, that world becomes that very lonely hotel room quickly.

Anyway, I saw Saw 3 and Borat this weekend. Why did I see Saw 3? How could I not? Rudy, Meghan and I usually manage to find the worst film out at any given time and agree to watch it. What is odd, is how successful these movies about torture have become. The Hostal movie already has a sequel coming out and there's a hideous looking thing called Turistas coming out next month. Then there's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Beginning, or whatever, with all those images of vulnerable women and burly men. It makes sense we would be obsessed with torture given our circumstances and fears of the other right now, but watching the totalitarian "philosophy" at work within the mechanizations of Saw 3 was truly depressing anyway. Anti-intellectual and believing that there is something fair about the way "Jigsaw" kills, because he takes people who aren't "grateful" for their lives and gives them a chance to redeem themselves through tremendous pain, the film walks us through a torture chamber and an operation room within that torture chamber. As entertainment, we witness brain surgery with power tools, but without any elan, sadly. We also get to see a man twisted to death in a machine better found in some mad king's castle. The operation is performed under torturous duress and the grimness of the doctor and the patient speak to some joyless world where one wonders how anybody could develop any sense of gratitude for life. I mean, in a movie, this should be put forth with a bit more sense of...something...fun? Fear? It's just accomplished fact here. We see bloody phlegm and the flap of the brain's protective seal that rests between skull and said brain. We see blood splatter all over a woman's face and we see her wash it off. Then later, in the same spirit, we see bone twist from skin and muscle, and the whole time there is the thinnest of stories tying us from the events we witness to some narrative understanding of these events. At the end, they cynically throw in a twist, so as to not make it too obvious that the main entertainment was the manipulation of body parts into positions of pain, a kind of pornography really, but later you can talk about that twist at the end. Whoa!

Whoa! indeed.

But I talked earlier about totalitarian yearnings in the subtext of the film, and there, at least, there was some interest in watching this waste of carbon. In the movie the people are told they have lived their lives wrongly, therefore, they must suffer in order to learn what is truly important and thus enter the world of livingly righteously. They deviate, they are punished in horrific ways and then they learn to understand what is truly important. Any individual ideas of right, wrong, redemption or corruption are subsumed by one who has taken it upon himself to teach the correct way. Jigsaw suffers greatly, but his goal is so important, that even as he lays struggling for life on a bed surrounded by instruments of death, he focuses on ways to instruct those who do not value what is so freely theirs. He is a martyr, giving his life so that we may understand. He occupies the position of Christ-figure, the fountain from which wisdom springs so that others may live, and of course his suffering excuses any suffering he inflicts. There are scenes that show him, some kind of industrious Ben Franklin, creating his works of instruction, these scenes, told in flashback, lack irony; there are scenes of him in love: those things that have been taken away from him as this great responsibility of torture are thrust upon him. Meanwhile, a judge, a failed judge, white, middle-aged, who failed to punish, is covered in the filth of slaughtered, rotted pigs, and almost drowns in them. Later his head explodes as a shotgun goes off while a black man, nailed and held in place by huge metallic clamps that cover most of his body, is twisted, bones popping and ripping, slowly to death. I'll leave the obvious subtexts here to somebody else.

It would all be so comic and ridiculous, if so much of it was not in accordance with ideas Americans seem to value. If you don't like what you're given, then it's you that's the problem! You don't know what suffering is! Let me tell you what suffering is, and I got through it! All this machismo and this desperate scrambling to fit into the norms of experience that have been traced for us. And the willingness to judge and punish...ugh: they're gettin' what they deserve. Watching it, I've blocked much of it out, not from the oozing imagery, but from the sheer monotony and grimness of its tone. It was so serious, and it really did seem to think it had something to say, and it was going to say it through the misunderstood actions of this moronic duo of torturers, one of whom it held up as some kind of visionary. It reminded me of these anti-intellectual and nationalist novels of Weimar Germany that are so ignored today, in which the values of a lost generation of German militarism were celebrated. Martyrdom is an essential component of those novels as well. Subtlety is confused with weakness and moral indecision and corruption. Certainty, the ability to will over others, those are the primary attributes of the heroic according to those that have argued thusly. We all saw where that went.

For those who can't understand the attraction to George Bush during the 2000 and especially the 2004 elections, and in the period of time the war on Iraq was first launched, watch this film, think about its popularity, and it all comes slowly into focus. In ten days, Saw 3 has made $60 million.

The next day I saw Borat, which was fun. The fraternity boys were the scariest, I think.

I think the Senate is going to go 51-49 for the Republicans. I saw somebody forecasting a 34 to 40 seat gain in the House for the Democrats, but I don't know about that. I think 15 to 20 maybe. I won't be surprised if I'm wrong, of course, and I hope I am and that every Republican running loses, but I wonder if a lot of these polls that show close races in historically Republican held areas won't see a reversion back to the familiar once the voting booths open. I think Americans now see polls taken before the elections as ways to show pleasure or, especially, displeasure with candidates. If you are going to vote for a particular candidate and he slaps his mistriss around, for instance, and somebody calls you and asks, are you going to vote for that guy who just slapped his somethin' on the side around or are you going to vote for this person, well, who are you going to admit to voting for? Or if they ask you, are you going to vote for this obviously racist guy who calls people mean names and, just in general, acts like an ass, or are you going to vote for this guy who just thinks weirdly about women (really, who can you vote for in that election - ugh), well, again, seeing as their stances on women are probably really a wash, it's easier to fess up to the lesser embarrassment. I do think Allen is in trouble in Virginia, but I think he'll win in the end. I think the Dems have a good shot in Missouri though. Stem cell research should be a bigger issue than the Democrats have made it really. In Missouri it might actually tilt the vote.

Conversely, if you're a good candidate, but running in an area that typically votes counter to your party or politics, then you can't believe leads in your favor. If I were Ford, in Tennessee, I'd want to see a seven or eight point lead before I felt like I had a real chance to win, because people might think you're a better guy, but when the chips are down...and it looks like Ford is going to lose sadly. Corker, well the name really does say it all. Fuck him. And his gross campaign.

It stinks of Republicanism.

suddenly it's the 1960s and we're in England...

2006-11-04T13:24:00.000-05:00

Republicans keep saying what we should be fucking, and then they go fuck something else.

You can apply this in a number of ways and I'll let you.

Ted Haggerd neither had sexual relations with that man nor did he inhale, all in one day, it must be horrible to put yourself in a position where you can do nothing but hate yourself. And others.

Because no matter what they say about Christian love, their swift pronouncements of judgment on anybody who professes a different belief or way of life than theirs has been disgusting for years, and while I'm sure they'll say nice things about good old Ted, they didn't about others who had different agendas from theirs. It's one thing to be gay and hate being gay, another thing completely, to enjoy it.

Meanwhile the White House doesn't even have so much class as to actually support the guy. It's one step away from "that guy, you mean the one over there? Is that Tony Haggerd? Oh...Tom? Yeah, I think he was in my econ class like, I don't know, freshman year? I think we sat next to each other a couple times but it was like, 'hey, what's up?' and that's it. I think once we studied together with some other people...maybe for the final?"

Which is laughable of course, because the whole way this administration has attempted to communicate and encode their various messages has been coached in the language and the justifications of the Christian Right. The idea that the Christian Right has seen it's messages distorted, as some are trying to claim now, is laughable. They support the Iraq War in huge numbers, are the ones most against stem cell research and have their own economic theory they claim supports conservative economic policy (which this administration has followed, the central tenet being basically, "make sure the rich get as much as they want, how they want it"). There are other ways the Christian Right has dominated philosophically this administration. Look at the way we interact with Israel or at the tax policies that have been shifted to give church based groups massive funding advantages and pretty much free-range in their doling of it. Not by accident are these people leading the large churches getting massively wealthy and living in nice places with pretty views, whether it be La Jolla or Colorado Springs. If this be Christianity, then it has all to do with Christ as the Golden Calf had to do with God, and I don't care what scripture they quote to justify their beliefs or their actions. They worship mammon.

They would be so much happier if they stopped looking in everybody else's windows.

Because then when they got caught kissing men, kissing women, buying drugs or acting like any other lost soul looking for something or anything, they wouldn't have to insist they were more found than anybody else.

Meanwhile Bill Frist is making his house look like 1600 Pensylvania Avenue, and it's weird, scary and just another example of the plutocracy making sure that they get theirs, and they're not even particularly afraid we'll notice anymore. What are we going to do after all? Who does that? How tacky and in love with yourself and power do you have to be where you can't even wait?

There's some vibes in their air, and what's funny, is that with all the wackiness in this country controlled by wolves and cheats, is that we're going to wake up, I'm afraid, on November 8th, and the same wolves and cheats will be telling us why we decided they were steering us down the right path.

The path right to the shakedown.

Provoking Behaviours...

2006-11-02T14:21:00.000-05:00

Today the L Train was like a dream of what it could be: hurtling through space underneath the East River, I was at school before I'd even listened to a few songs on my iPod. It's been all about DJ Spooky lately, paranoid vibes from the ether all about us with dystopian forebodings grumbling from the froth of the ocean, killing the little mollusks and plankton by melting their shells. It's all coming back to us one way or the other, but for now it would be nice if researchers could research and lovers could love so I'm all about watching what happens with these elections.

I can't look away and it's hard to watch the late surge toward our basest emotions and the self-righteousness, which has all the ethical and moral weight of "my dog ate it", acting as surrogate protector of us all. Bush talks about Democrats winning for the Terrorists, whoever they are this week, and George Allen lets his classroom bullies beat up some snot-nosed wanna-be Rabelais and watch the video, they look so focused and convinced of their rightness that you expect to hear about how they took care of that cattle thief. It's like what it must have been like to watch Pinkerton's men off-duty at some Baltimore bar taking care of a wrong-way wandering unionizer. Tucking back in their shirts and straightening their ties, looking like they did something and reasserting their place in the grand order of things. I want a pair of those pants. Burning those pants is like burning the flag.

The Democrats are apologizing for insinuating we're stuck in Iraq or something, maybe they think we called the wrong people stupid, but as far as I can make out, it looks like the guy being called stupid is kind of dumb; we didn't know what we were doing in Iraq from before we got there, but still he insists on saying that's what's keeping us safe, so Dick "Dick" C. and Dick "Dick" Rumsy are going to stay on the line far from the shooting for another couple years or so, and all those people are dying like the graham crackers a couple hours before supper. Because the blood there is only just prelude to the deluge. Dark days and all this going through the motions like it means something besides the dark days are coming.

I lost a student Halloween, he was hit by a livery cab on Harlem River Drive, he had been suspended for awhile, so I hadn't seen him since I guess late September. He was a good kid in my classroom, and I liked him, wrote a note about him to someone saying he showed some promise, he would be ok. He was throwing eggs at cars with some friends, I teach them too. They got spooked and ran when they actually hit something. Tried to cross the highway and he stumbled on the median. The driver didn't stop. I found out he liked playing ping pong. I never knew that.

John Kerry - how dare he!?!

2006-11-01T12:03:00.000-05:00

So it's odd, you navigate over to good old nytimes.com and there's some article about John Kerrysome article about John Kerry saying poor and uneducated people are fighting in Iraq. Trustworthy Bush acts all insulted, and suggests that they are fighting because they are patriots. Again the lie puts truth on the defensive and the Democrats go play their turtle game and the truth John Kerry was getting at, that many of our soldiers joined because the other options they had all came with smocks and that economic opportunities for most of this country are fading, got swept under the rug.

How I hate the Democrats. When one of them finally has the guts to say something that actually has meaning behind it, they run from truth like it's a grenade (whereas the Republicans use the actual grenade to blow up the truth). And what makes it wonderful is when the ones who actually said something true, meekly concede that perhaps they were wrong.

There's a lot of truth-dodging and truth-exploding going on right now, so I took the day off, feeling kind of low-down, and it's enough to upset one, the Republicans are bullying their way to another avoidance of defeat I don't wonder. It's scary, and I hope I'm being Eyore when I wonder about how the Democrats are going to blow another election and what it says about the American people that George Allen and Bob Corker (I swear to God) will probably win their Senate races even though on the evolutionary scale they are just a little less than pond scum, a little more than shit.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about calling the American people stupid, it comes from the plutocracy, where stupid is exactly what they want, but how can we call a group of people who still defend or accept the right of an elected official to cozy up to ol' Reb, the Dixie flag, fear homosexuals having sex, don't fear the fact that the ocean is turning into soda fizz and that the weather is acting unglued, connect Iraq to 9/11, wave the flag and watch really bad television, sometimes for days at a time be called intelligent? And this is just the beginning of a long list that includes complaining about the price of gas for their oil tankers/SUV's, ignoring public education except to worry if the latest version of communism is being taught (homo-stuff? etc.?). Despite the media saturation, Americans still find it impossible to weed out the chaff from the wheat of what's important to them.

Because I don't recognize the centrality of their religious belief? No, because I should have the right, along with you and everybody else, to refuse to have their religion dictate what this government does. And because sham religion, which allows hate, inequality and injustice, is not religion, but human power calling for Godly power, power it can never sway.

Parent - Teacher Conferences...

2006-10-27T13:49:00.000-04:00

(I'm writing this at school, the censor picks up any kind of cursing or talking of dirtiness, so one has to write carefully or see one's "ddr" score which always makes me think of the German Democratic Republic - it's annoying)

The sun is out, the air is crisp, later on it's supposed to rain until Sunday and weather advisories have already been sent out.

The world is going to dump rain once I get out of here. But I'm in here now and it's stupid. Parent/Teacher conferences can be annoying because often the teacher only sees the good students' parents. On the rare occasion one sees a problem student's parents, if one is not careful, it turns into a mutual bitching session in which the end result is: "the child could really do so much better! We have to make a plan!"

Meanwhile, most of the time, the trouble is the kid's getting high somewhere and could care absolutely less about whatever happens in here. Try telling that to a parent: "Yeah, basically, your kid's made a choice, he/she can go f--k and get high with other of the like-minded, or he/she can learn about the War of 1812. So basically, yeah, your kid just happens to be one of the kids who can't juggle these activities so well." And really, the choice should be more difficult than it sounds, because as posed, there's always later to learn about the War of 1812, but actually there isn't. It's the opposite way, it just doesn't feel that way to a kid who's been shuffled in and out of classes since the age of three, four or five.

A brilliant person I once knew used to beg, "can we just end this charade quietly? Please?" And it's how I feel today, what are we going to learn really? But there's a bustle in the school, a lot of the self-importants get to feel self-important and the scornful get to feel scornful and think about how later, it's going to rain, and it's going to keep coming down and the sidewalks of New York will be a mess of cold puddles climbing up wet jeans and people huddled and running from building to building and never being completely comfortable.

The weekend is here.

why I'm writing so infrequently and some other things...

2006-10-18T21:46:00.000-04:00

October is mostly gone, the weather is schizophrenic and often I get through a day and realize I haven't stopped to think, even once.

I've been working on some other writing, which is kept me from here, often on another blog...and I've been thinking a lot about how obvious my thoughts are.

But having said that, it was annoying to hear Tony Snow talking about how the president is unshaken in his resolve after 70 combat deaths in Iraq this month, and about how he grieves for their lost valor but how, "as everybody says", we "have" to win.

Well, not everybody says that. Some people believe we are losing much more in our efforts to win than we would if we lost. And we've already lost.

In many ways.

Regardless, I found it offensive, like pretty much everything the bastards do. So that's not surprising.

so, to what extent are CIA secret prisons concentration camps?

2006-09-28T23:43:00.000-04:00

Not so secret now, but the Democrats once again proved their gutlessness, allowing without comment (i.e. a filibuster) a bill that basically makes democracy a system propped up at the mercy of the president and a few minions, rather than as an assertion of the people.

When people can be held as such a way that will soon be permissible, then any notion of democracy as being anything other than a convenience of the bastards will have faded as certainly as the old fashioned notion that a court of laws should determine innocence or guilt.

How abstracted from terrorism must something be before we acknowledge that there is no connection between these acts of government and terrorism? If somebody calls you an 98 pound weakling for something falsely, why be a 98 pound weakling for something else truly?

As evil as the Republicans are, in the end, what proves the sham of this democracy is more the inability of the Democrats to make any kind of meaningful argument or stand against the railroading of these horrible bills pushed through by an opportunistic set of bastards, why was there no filibuster? This is a bill that actually makes habeas corpus merely optional. This is the threat of the PATRIOT Act made manifest and complete.

At what point is our freedom at the pleasure of our God and at what point is that same freedom at the pleasure of another man? Does anybody ever sit around and think how odd it is that we are having a national debate about the nature and rightness of torture?

Fear is ugly. Opportunism even uglier. But despair is the ugliest worm of this democracy, it makes nary a sound crawling through the rot heaped upon it by the juvenile delinquents who pass for our law-givers. Like the worms beneath us, the Democrats among us on the Capital are little seen, and never more than something to be cast aside, once the plow has cut them.

a few quick notes before bed...

2006-09-17T02:16:00.000-04:00

School's going into its third week, already I feel sleep deprived and kind of cranky most of the time. It's like I've always just read an article about the bush administration now.

The L train is doing it's usual suck job and any time the weather's bad, it's even worse. All during the week it rained and dreared and I waited underground for the train. It was always too early.

And at the end of the week they gave me an extra prep and threw in some sophomores.

Anyway, whatever. During the week I spent a lot of time thinking about the Saw series of movies and the Final Destination series of movie and about how in a culture where we enjoy torture so much, of course the president, heading into election day electioneering, would scrap for a more legal standing for torture. Sadly, I think it will work just enough, and while he might not get the torture, he and his pals can point and preemptively say, "I told you so". They'll talk about how Iraq is on the upswing, after all, they've stopped counting all the bodies now, another nod in its obtuseness to Vietnam which this all faintly echoes politically, and just enough people in just enough states will leave America's Top Model and Lost to swing the vote safely far enough so that the Republicans will be able to enjoy the next couple years of power.

I've given up on Iraq, we're going to continue a slow bleed there until somebody sane comes around, not a John Kerry, not a Hillary Clinton, definately not a Rudy G. or John McCain, but somebody who actually has a sense of the world larger than his or her political ambitions. So for a long time.

But it saddens me that the powers of the Courts will continue to erode, that the rights of all will be sacrificed to the convenience of the few and that evil lobbyists will continue to act proxy in our sham of democracy.

Not that voting (d)emocrat would change that...it's just easy to be depressed after having made the mistake of reading a transcript of the bush speech that interrupted the bush group hug of a tv movie from 9/11(/06).

I would argue that the democrats should push that idea, that voting Republican is voting for all the naked classism, not just some, and that the bastards continue to make K Street the new Main Street...but it would probably actually help the Freedofascists, and as incompetent as they are at actually running anything, they know well enough how to deliver the vote come election day.

Who does all this hurt though? There's still bad television, several million dating sites on the internet, playstation and other et ceteras that even if it eventually comes knocking, you won't hear it.

Bush was talking about how we don't kill the innocent the way the terrorists do, I was reading this and thinking perhaps one of the wire services or newspapers reporting the speech might bring up civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, might bring up all kinds of things really, but none did.

The Cubs won again today, it's looking more and more likely they'll avoid 100 losses. And Rich Hill threw a complete game, the first one by a Cub all year. Ah, my team! Yesterday, with the Dodgers only a half game up, Maddux threw seven innings of one hit ball up against the Padres, the team right behind them. 331 wins.

a few quick comments...

2006-09-02T00:25:00.000-04:00

The rain is steady to drenching tonight, and will be for the next couple days at least. Another hurricane down the East Coast so it must be almost autumn.

Today I started getting ready for school again, threw out a lot of stuff, looked out the window and thought about how little has changed over the summer. Room 648 gleamed, wide open spaces and bright but grayed light. My desk is clean and the rows are arranged in a neat semi-circle, the duel rows even. Summer is over.

There was a war in the middle, pointless, destroying thousands of lives, killing at least a thousand people, meanwhile in Iraq thousands and thousands continued to die and no real answer emerged as to why this suffering was necessary.

We could get existential or Dostoevskian and wonder aloud if the reason for suffering needs an answer save what is God's or what is our own understanding of it, but the fact is, there were no weapons of mass destruction and there is no democracy in a society where violence, murder and terror punctuate every call to prayer. But the same things continue in the same way. In Lebanon the question of who is a terrorist, really has become a meaningless one, just as in Iraq. Credibility, lost with imperialism so long ago, is not even an illusion that the West can create for itself anymore, much less these others.

This is why the horserace of politics receives such press I don't wonder, because we are so hungry for something different to happen that we cover the nuances and vagueries of the powerful and wealthy as they scrap to see who will have the most power to dole out the most wealth to who. It's easier than questioning actual policy or the lack of it, easier than looking into the consequences of things and easier than studying alternatives to the way of things now. The press has let us down, and our failure of the imagination and our demands to keep entertained have allowed the atrocities of ignorant fools, so what else is there to say? I've been thinking about that.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is about how predictable ideologies are, and therefore movements and, in a way, policies (which are like ideologies in a way) and countries as well. There are fewer subtleties to make the actions of large things confusing, as there are with individuals. The large unweildy responses of ideology and policy to individual lives are so abstract from the experience of life as to make all this truly absurd. But we all desire the oracle's touch to tell us how we are connected to these things which have no real meaning for us.

My thinking is becoming muddled because I'm so tired. But I wanted to write something as it has been too long. Perhaps in here, there is the reason for my writing to have been infrequent as of late.

snakes on a plane // stark realities : just a few quick thoughts

2006-08-10T13:04:00.000-04:00

Arrests in London in regard to the newest bomb plot are only another reminder of how the administrations in England and in the United States have failed to protect the people they were pledged to represent. We are worse off and more vulnerable for them than we are safer. The two administrations have failed to address root causes and in fact have only encouraged the attempts of more such attacks.

Bush, in his usual politically charged way, made a statement to the effect that this was "a stark reminder that the nation is at war with Islamic fascists", meanwhile, all this statement did was give the terrorists even more status than they deserve and remind anybody who wants to be reminded just how misguided our priorities in fighting the "war on terrorism" have been.

If you're one of those people who might think about being a terrorist, how much more status than what your life is at the moment, must it be to be told that an entity that you hate is at war with what you are to become, considers YOU a huge threat. Meanwhile, the rest of your life resembles Luke Skywalker's at the beginning of Star Wars. No prospects, no job, the ragged edge of nowhere but suddenly you can be thrust into "the middle of it all". I really believe that the rhetoric of it all should be toned way down, as I've said before, and the fact that it hasn't, only is suggestive of how political this war is at home, in regards to how it plays in Witchita rather than in what can be used in the hysterical calls to action of radical imams in the squalid outliers of obscure Pakistani cities and elsewhere across the Mideast, London and Paris.

This is not an ideological war, this is a police action taken to eliminate the threat posed by people who sought to murder other people as some kind of "statement". Murder is murder, in the end, the motiviations are just a curiosity or, in this case, something that should be examined to assess the threat of further action by similarly willing people. Or at least that's what it should be.

Unfortunately, George Bush and the cartel he's got, have expressed a willingness to make this an ideological war, and in doing so, have only encouraged the identification of a great many people, on both sides, with those who would do murder and have revenge for any number of reasons.

Meanwhile, as I sit here listening to Blossom Dearie sing the BEST version (even better than Astrud Gilberto's) of "The Shadow of Your Smile", I see that another suicide bomber had the satisfaction of ripping dozens more bodies apart in Najaf, killing 35 or so of them in that Shi'ite holy city to the south of Baghdad. This is simply another stark reminder of how by placing our priorities in Iraq we have only encouraged and helped incubate the expansion of terror networks around the world.

It's just another story that twins too sadly with the plot exposed in London.

Apparently all the strife of today will not prevent George Bush from appearing at a Republican fund raiser, just as planned, later today.

weighing in really quickly on Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman

2006-08-09T19:07:00.000-04:00

Ned Lamont or Joe Lieberman. Who cares about which man won? The important thing is what does Ned Lamont's victory come to mean to the larger electorate? And we can see how it's being spun by the Republicans simply by looking at Time Magazine's coverage, which suggests that now the Republicans will be able to scare people by using the "L" word again. They seem pretty excited about that.

Let them. The meaning, it can be argued, is that people are tired of reducing arguments to meaningless words, words exactly like Liberal. Liberal used to mean big government, now it means not thinking gay people are going to hell or that Iraqis were behind 9/11.

Conservative used to mean being against big social programs and being for states rights. Now conservative apparently means really large and intrusive government and religious bigotry. So if they want to go to scare politics, it might be better to use the "neocon" label and that's one better employed by people like Ned Lamont. And that's precisely why he was able to win.

Joe Lieberman is not a neocon, isn't even all that different than Lamont once you get beyond the Iraq War. But that's the rub, because while Lamont was able to fire away at his neocon tendencies in regards to Iraq, how was Lieberman supposed to react? What simplicity could he resort to? So I take back my initial argument above, I believe the control over the reduction of argument, the shorthand that passes for political discourse in the United States, actually presents a slight advantage right now to the Democrats. Americans aren't tired of reducing arguments, it's just that what's reducible right now favors the Progressives rather than the Plutocrats.

The big question is does that actually mean anything?

I don't believe that Ned Lamont OR Joe Lieberman have anything in them that's ready to deal with the problems as they are here. I don't think there is a Bobby Kennedy, after he had whatever moment of clarity that he did in the mid-1960s to be what he was in 1968, don't think there's any politician out there who responds to the needs of the most vulnerable. What's more, I don't think most of the people who vote actually want one.

So it's Ned Lamont.

some random thoughts lead to a long digression on Darlene Love

2006-08-07T02:46:00.000-04:00

Saint Hillary's smack to the knuckles of SecDef Rumsfeld almost passed for entertainment last week, in the end though, it was just another attempt by another Democrat to rationalize her support for this misguided war by attacking the administration she helped give the blank check to for fighting this war. She disgusts me because for her, the grilling of Dick Rumsfeld had not even the slightest of anything to do with the 2600 war dead, had nothing to do with the decimated Iraqi society come completely unglued, had nothing to do even, with the subject nominally at hand, that is the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration in planning and fighting this war; no, this had everything to do with the Saint putting herself on center stage in a position she has never actually held and doesn't believe in, that is the role of somebody actually against this war. It's odd for somebody to desire to be perceived as believing something they actually don't believe, but there you had it, with microphones, last week. In an odd way, watching her was like reading about Mel Gibson's apology. She's talking about management, he's talking about alcohol, and the real issue is why was there a completely unnecessary war? In terms of Mel, there is no real issue, save that Disney was earlier willing to give him gobs of money to produce something about the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, you don't hear Senator Clinton putting pressure on Condoleezza Rice to put any diplomatic pressure on Israel, you don't hear her taking on the oil companies (with profits just below record levels) and you don't hear her talking about what needs to be done in New Orleans, where the drug trade is flourishing, the neighborhoods are being priced out of existence and where thousands and thousands of people still live in trailer cities far from their former homes. Actually, I haven't heard of too many Democratic politicians doing any of these things, though you hear a lot of people wishing they would.

Anyway, my views on the current political climate I find to be pretty pedestrian at the moment, there doesn't seem to be too much to say that's not being better said elsewhere about Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, the environment (I'm for it) and all other subjects political. However, I've been thinking a lot about Darlene Love's voice lately, having just purchased her greatest hits collection, and about how beautiful and overlooked she is.

Listening to her "Strange Love" from the Phil Spector box set, "Back to Mono", I cannot stop thinking about her similarities to Dusty Springfield and about how she should have had her own concerts in Memphis (though supposedly she does have a pretty good concert record). And all that would have happened, if she had been better served by her producer, her manager, anybody, and she would not have ended up acting in soaps, which really isn't a lamentable fate. Spector, though, never really seemed to know what to do with her and nobody else figured it out either, her voice is so strong that it almost even overpowers his wall of sound, you hear him employing all the tricks he can as producer to make the voice part of his own idea of the song, but he fails: the voice breaks free from the strings, the choruses, the upwelling of staging that goes into declaring undying and unsatisfying love and hints at the famous tears in things of Lucretius. Her voice is beyond Ronnie Spector's even, way beyond, but to whom should she have gone to in the early 1960s besides Phil Spector? Sue Records is too sparse, the arrangements on their sides would have in effect led to her singing a capella, and anyway, that's an East Coast label and she was from Los Angeles. Stax's sound was to earthy, wouldn't provide, I don't think, the right context for her voice, in a sense there's too much sex in Stax, too much earth. Motown might have been a nice fit, except Barry Gordy already had his Diana Ross and I don't think he could even understand that here is a voice that could be something even more than that, not to undersell "Mountain High, River Deep" or "Love Child", but "Strange Love", in two and a half minutes, is proof enough that Darlene Love was made for greater things than even these songs. Besides, Motown, as great as it was, was a bit middle of the road, I don't think it hurt enough for her voice. You never really believe, except in "Up the Ladder to the Roof", that any of the Supremes is really all that put out by love (though in "Mountain High, River Deep"...)

But Phil Spector was married to an idea of pop music in which his ideas of the song had to be central. The theme was all and the theme was that there was this place just of west of reality where love would finally prevail, where things were pure and all the drama of this world was in the conflict between what we are faced with and what we are going to make when we can finally fall into each other's arms. Like Bresson in film, his little dramas were tightly controlled and the singers and the actors in these productions were entirely interchangeable as far as Spector and Bresson were concerned. But where Bresson stripped his actors of all emotion, and where Bresson broke down the settings so that they were little more than stages with tables and ceilings in order to make the story everything, Spector, in his attempt to do the same thing, gave the singer a central role, put emphasis on the voice but then dressed it up in the strings, the choruses and the words of eternal adolescent longing so that again, the idea, the story became everything, but unlike with Bresson's sparseness, this was achieved with the consistancy of Spector's lushness. I think this effect, of making the story all, really backfired when he tried to work with the Beatles who were also a little bit beyond the adolescent longings of 1961 by the time Phil got to them, but I mean, the essence of the Beatles from where we are, seems to be in their individualness, there individual cults of personality, something almost anathema to a Phil Spector song. How many people can really tell the difference between the Chrystals and the Shirelles? But it's pretty easy with Paul, John, George and Ringo.

But even Spector seemed to understand that Darlene Love was different, didn't really fit into the way that he made records. And a long time later he tried to record with her again, trying to reconnect to some sense she had given his songs even beyond what he had imagined and never really been able to pin down anywhere else, and though she had been ill-served by him way back when, she agreed to show up once again to his studio after her new producers had sold out her contract back to Spector. But it never did work, one last great song, "Lord, if You're a Woman", and she never looked back.

I don't know why this story bothers me so much, why I keep thinking about it.

spin: after spending some time at the New York Times

2006-07-28T03:22:00.000-04:00

A brief note before I get to what I want to think about right now: Peter Doran, a professor in earth sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago writes in today's New York Times that his research on Antarctica has been taken out of context by the conservitive moron crew that includes the likes of Ann Coulter and the Hannity guy in regards to global warming, while this is about as surprising as the fact that Russia and China are both big, it does once again show how the Plutocracy assumes, so you don't have to, what the truth should be.

It's quite a popular story, the only story emailed more from the New York Times at the moment is about how your yoga mat might have germs. Be careful.

Germs, everywhere these days - little liberal nabobs of negativity.

Another brief note on the piece process in Lebanon and the attempt to figure out what must happen there: the idea that a cease fire is meaningless, which the U.S. appears to hold, undoes their own logic, oddly enough, that a ceasefire is only a desired end if it leads to peaceful solutions rather than simply a brief cessation of violence.

Without a cease fire a peaceful solution becomes more and more impossible, because who is going to want to bargain with Israel now? Who is going to say, "hey, we got some fair concessions here" now? Regardless of the deal brokered. What Arab can support patience when the Israelis are reportedly using phospherous weapons and who knows what in Lebanon (any weapson really)? Rice's arguments seem semi-logical and responsible on first blush or if you're not paying any attention, but not when you read about individual Egyptians buying 20 posters of Hizbullah's Nasrallah and when you see cartoons of Israeli tanks sitting on the Arab map in the "new Middle East" (Rice quoting from the Oslo accords), then quickly it becomes horribly clear how the U.S. stance makes absolutely no sense. It's really Orwellian, not to lean on an over-used adjective, but they seem to suggest that the one thing that might make their stance possible later is impossible now because it's not their stance. If any European or Arab nation secretly supports the U.S. position, as the New York Times strongly suggests, then what they are supporting is civilian lives now for the POSSIBILITY of a peace settlement later, one that will be made in defiance of the people and which will only do even more to create this groundswell against Israel and for Hizbullah and perhaps other Arab groups that support active violence against Israel. I think the U.S. might be thinking, "well, it's too late now for any real sustainable long term peace, so we might as well let Israel take care of as much of Hizbullah as they can." That seems to be the impetus behind Bush's remarks that seem to indicate he's willing to give the Israelis as much time as they need, not just another week like Time supposed earlier this week.

The New York Times argued in their news analysis that the administration is undoing a year's work of diplomatic re-positioning, but I don't see it. Yes, they have managed not to completely alienate the Europeans over Iran, but I think that has more to do with what Iran is than with how we've handled the situation. I believe the same thing about our "handling" of North Korea. When the New York Times is praising how the Bush Administration has dealt diplomatically with North Korea mere weeks after North Korea tested some missiles in the Sea of Japan, then you have to wonder what the hell they're thinking.

It's odd how the failures of an entire world end up being the deaths in the end of a collection of people who are, after all, simply this person who lives on this street, and that person who grew up here and liked this or liked that.

dupelomacy

2006-07-25T15:20:00.000-04:00

Manichaean ideas of good and evil lose their clarity when confronted with the world of screams that is Southern Lebanon but there is Condoleezza Rice assuring everybody that it IS terrorists who are completely responsible for the carnage in Lebanon and Israel and the terrorists are called Hizbullah, therefore efforts to immediately halt the deaths of Lebanese citizens who are innocent of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time aren't necessary.

What she was doing in Beirut is not exactly clear but I can guess a few things based on the previous acts of this administration. First, nothing is as important as to create the appearance of confronting the problem. Second, don't confront the problem, use the problem as an opportunity to assert a matter of policy that will allow the problem you appear to confront to become a larger problem left unconfronted. Third, thumb your nose at everybody that says your wrong, and when you're wrong, talk about how you're dealing with terrorists while everybody else is ignoring the problem you are so bravely confronting by not confronting the problem but instead, actually encouraging the spread of that problem so that you can claim to confront it even more. It sounds like the Marx Brothers but it lacks the panache.

She thanked the Lebanese Government for being brave, which is actually surreal, and then headed down to Israel where she stood by and looked resolute while Prime Minister Olmert pledged to continue on the attacks, Rice added that before the violence can stop there has to be a groundwork for lasting peace.

This is the kind of absurdity that Brendan Behan wrote about, this is the kind of absurdity that buries the child before the parent.

There are millions of Arabs who do not want an Israel, every bomb made in the U.S.A., dropped by an Israeli fighter jet and exploded in a Lebanese neighborhood makes them more fervant. It doesn't matter what the cause is and it doesn't matter if Hizbullah is disbanded, once upon a time Hizbullah was Fatah. Making "lasting" peace a condition for peace talks only further jeopardizes them, for the Arabs who don't want an Israel it makes it easy to figure out what to do next.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Section a book was reviewed detailing the pogroms against Polish Jews returning home after the Holocaust, those pogroms were as bad as the pogroms that consumed the Russian Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Jews who had survived the trains to Dachau and Auschwitz were thrown off the trains that promised to take them home, and now, for many Jews, the spectre of pogrom once again finds expression in the random rockets of Hizbullah and the random suicide bombers who walk into the light of a Sbarro or a shopping mall and rearrange the worlds of the victims.

For the people of Lebanon is this something else? Do they perceive it as something else?

One thing they do perceive, one Lebanese government official categorized Rice's visit as "not encouraging". Is it ever encouraging to talk to the chronically obtuse?

go home!

2006-07-22T15:31:00.000-04:00

Condi Rice is not going to eat any humble pie, she is not going to acknowledge that American diplomacy in the Middle East under the Bush Administration has been an oxymoran and she is not going to actually listen to anything said to her by any of the Arab countries in the region. This administration dictates its reality, but it has never taken notes and it has never reacted to anything that fell outside of its narrow view of the world.

So Condi is out there right now trying to convince a bunch of Egyptians, Saudis and Jordanians to go to Syria and tell Syria that we're ok. Meanwhile we're sending precision bombs to Israel that will, in the next week, be dropped on Lebanon where they will undoubtedly mingle the blood of the guilty with the blood of the innocent in a rubble and dust stew. The Egyptians haven't bothered to send anybody of significance to listen to Condi pull her Colin and what amazes me is she's doing it like she's the angry third grade teacher in a classroom of misfits but we're the ones trying to get a note passed around in the class.

How do so many Americans feel safer with this group of morons representing them?

How can an Arabic country even want to speak for us to Syria with any degree of belief when we've clearly signalled that we're ok with a what? Couple hundred, couple thousand, how many thousand dead Lebanese civilians? Imagine you got a little leaflet that floated from heaven that said, "yeah, you should probably leave, your house is going to be gone sometime in the next week? Take your valuables and wander in the desert." Those are the lucky ones of Tyre, the unlucky ones dawdled a little too close to a truck or lived on the same block as a targeted building - their lives, whatever they were, are no more, and for what? Now imagine you lead an Arabic country where the feelings against Israel and America tower to a furious rage as those bird wings of lives are broken over the rocks of Lebanon on the televisions of your country, how can you afford to side with America?

We are creating incubators for Islamic Radicalism and we have made it the most important movement in the world. If you are marginalized, how important it is to be taken seriously! That alone...

When we eat the humble pie, how much of it will be made with our own blood?

It's the scariest thought, but not for Condi or the Dicks, undoubtedly, it will be somebody else's blood: the bad have always slept well.

various pitfalls

2006-07-21T04:21:00.000-04:00

Well, the neocons at the Weekly Standard think we've got to prove we're man enough to Iran and that the suffering that results will be good for us. After all, once again, it's permanently 1938. For a long time this constant resort to the failure of Appeasement confused me, I sympathized with the worry, after all, who wants Hitler?

Still I couldn't agree with it, and would put to the dangers of historical analogy, after all, Hitler was able to rise so qucikly (after years of near irrelevance) because those who were in a position to stop him compared him to various things, people and movements that he was not and therefore, helped him. People are always talking about history repeating itself but this is nonsense. Events are distinct and made up of millions of pieces. Patterns emerge in places but then are subsumed by subsequently occuring events so that only when we look at a part do we see seeming similarities of the whole. Having said that...at some point I was teaching World War One again, a subject I love to teach, at some point and I thought, 1938 hell, this is all shaking out much more like 1898, 1900, when the forces of various programs led by the plutocratic idealists also held sway over much of the world. How else to explain the delusional fantasies of Cecil Rhodes's deepest Africa or other European actions in Africa, Asia and just about everywhere else and how compatible those various beliefs are with the beliefs of the plutocratic administration led by Bush and Vice?

Also, this makes sense because imperialism unleashed a vision of the world that has become pervasive and hard to shake, because to shake it is to confront the darkness of our own cultures. To anybody that's examined Conrad, this should come as no surprise. This vision suggested that as we exploited those weaker than us, we would elevate them in spirit and show them that our way led to the light of salvation if they would just cooperate and let us dictate to them what actually was.

The idea that we are instruments of salvation is beguiling and gives us the confidence to look beyond injustice or to interpret it as something allowable because it is part of a larger movement that is God's Plan. Other people's suffering or unbelief, regardless of the cause, after all, allows us to become missionaries of God's Love and God's Will. This argument is used everywhere seemingly, at the moment.

Imperialism, likewise, suggests that we can invasively make changes, and as long as they are done in the spirit of our beliefs, these changes we make to others will benefit them. These beliefs can be religious, and they can also be brought about by ideas of what our culture stands for, what our country means and other nonsense that allows us to justify our violences as the spreading of peace, economy and community. As in the late 1800s and early 1900s, actions create reactions, and reactions create reprisals, and reprisals create revenge and revenge creates fury and fury creates the the law of the jungle as practiced by man. Wherever we look, there it is: the massings of anger.

In the early 1900s, as now, there were plenty of skirmishes, even some pretty big wars (Russo-Japanese and Boer Wars for instance - the American incursion into the Philippines), and tensions rose over the competitions of national feeling, the desire to control how the world's prizes were divvied, as the world armed itself to the teeth, and as nations counted their friends and their enemies, war came because the dialectic of war had been entered into.

And if we are to talk about appeasement and its dangers, should we not talk about the failures of historical analogy that preceded and drove that appeasement and take a long, hard look at how much Iran has profited from the American actions of the last few years and should we not look at the brushfire of radical religion everywhere in this world, including Washington D.C.

And yet, there is another precedent that would be interesting to explore, cheaper and perhaps more useful. In the late 1940s George Marshall and company devised the Marshall Plan, a massive aid program to rebuild Europe and contain the spread of communist sympathies in the countries we counted as our friends and satellites. I believe that to exit from the dialectic of war, it would be helpful if the schools that most Lebanese and Palestinian children went to weren't run by Hamas and Hizbullah. I believe that increased cultural exchange and interaction would also be necessary, the United States should be included in this increased cultural exchange and attempt to play a central role in the development of peaceful enterprises. We should believe that peace is stronger than the acts undoubtedly arrayed against it by the many forces of hate. Down the path we are on the fires will only grow more fierce.

storms

2006-07-20T12:59:00.000-04:00

The Cubs lost again last night, 4-2. They continue to sit 20 games under .500 and all year speculation about whether and at what point they should fire Dusty Baker has swirled, yet Baker continues to manage and the Cubs continue to lose and make goofball mistakes that bring an immediate sense of nostalgia to anybody that grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s when players like Ken Reitz and Mike Lum paraded the grounds of the dingy and aging Wrigley Field to mostly empty stands while Dick Tidrow and Ken Kravitz glumly threw up offerings to other, more competent teams.

There was no team less competent than the Cubs and I worshipped Dave Kingman and thought Ivan de Jesus was underrated.

De Jesus slugged .233 in 1981 and was second in plate appearances and at bats for the Cubs that year. Now we have another de Jesus and his name is Neifi Perez.

The other day the Cubs pulled off something not even the 1981 Cubs were able to do, they gave up two grand slams in an inning. That inning they gave up 11 runs and a game they had once been winning 5-0 was lost 13-7. In true Cubs fashion, the grand slams by Cliff Floyd and Carlos Beltran were divided by a David Wright two run shot. Todd Walker tried to take the blame, but once again you couldn't help but notice the hand of Baker placing his pawns in the path of the rooks and bishops the Mets lined up. Why would anybody, in a game that, at that moment it occurred, you were winning 5-3 with one out in the sixth inning, would you bring in your worst reliever with runners on base and your four best relievers, that you paid untold millions to just sitting there? Is that Todd Walker's fault?

And the constant grousing about what Todd Walker can't do when he's been one of the best hitters on the club and has been willing to go wherever the Cubs put him has been nearly criminal. Meanwhile Neifi Perez, until very recently when his awfulness has reached atomic brightness that can be seen even from outer space, received at bat after at bat. For Neifi they shouldn't be called at bats, they should be called weak grounders. The Cubs off the record complaining about Walker is kind of like the slob complaining about the messy couch but it's consistent with a regime that has no idea at all how to construct talent in any meaningful way. Witnessing their attempts to build any kind of team following a coherent philosophy is like watching a dog with Legos.

When the Cubs make some kind of move, occasionally it has some utility and you think, wow, these guys are figuring it out, but then they do something so asinine you know that it was kind of like a monkey making a sentence, the next line will more than likely be nonsense. Such was the case this off-season, they had suffered through a couple seasons of Nomar Garciaparra being injured and decided he wasn't worth a risk anymore. Better not to give an incentive-laden contract because hey, fool me once right? Some Cubs fans here might protest, "well, remember we had to see if Ronny Cedeno was the real deal," please remember then that the Cubs wanted to give Rafael Furcal tens of millions of dollars. The Dodgers were lucky enough to get Nomar but as penance, they ended up with the fruits of Furcal. Nomar is batting .345.

Furcal, who the Cubs wanted, has seen his performance falter, though he's had a decent last month, kind of.

If you have a Cedeno and you want to see what he can do, but you want to try and win, why not sign Garciaparra, who will probably miss at least some time with injury, and he has, and then have Cedeno there to spell him. Cedeno will still get enough playing time not to regress and might actually develop better in such a situation. WIth the Cubs it's sink or swim, with predictable results.

And what is clear from all that is that the last thing the Cubs should have been wasting their off-season on was trying to sign Rafael Furcal. It took luck to keep the Cubs from throwing even more money into this pit of listlessly played baseball.

And then there was the Juan Pierre deal which the Cubs made because they never figured out how to work with Corey Patterson, who has had an excellent year in Baltimore after the Cubs fussed, fidgeted and complained, again, about what he couldn't do, for the last few years. They gave him chances to succeed, then they kicked at him while he was out there and failed, yet again, to help develop him as a player. In the end they punted him for basically nothing and then gave up two excellent pitching prospects and a serviceable pitcher in Sergio Mitre for Pierre who replaced Patterson. It was bad on both sides and in the end they went backward and backward.

I think this is one reason the Cubs end up with amazing players surrounded by useless ones. They have no idea how to develop a player, but if a player comes who's so good it doesn't matter, even they can see that once in awhile. How do you fuck up a Zambrano? You don't - although the Cubs at one point seemed to think his future was probably as a reliever.

The team is run by apologists who fail to maximize what player talent they do have because they don't want to risk being put up for criticism by a media that appears to think baseball is still being played in the dead-ball era.

The morons that cover this team glory in little things like hitting behind the runner, bunting and the stolen base. Manufactured runs gleam like fools' gold to them, while the three run homer, unless hit by the elegant and wonderful Derrick Lee (and I mean that), are eschewed, as if they had been hit by some fat man with a beer in his hand at a 16" tourney. They spent so much time talking about Todd Walker's errors in the Mets game that you would have thought he hit the Mets homeruns, and at least one of those errors, the one Beltran reached on before later hitting his grand slam, would probably have been an infield hit anyway. The ball was hit slow and Beltran was flying, after all, unlike the Cubs, he had a game to win.

It's painful to watch the Cubs wallow so miserably, there's Zambrano out there, seemingly oblivious to the negative nabobs who surround him, when he pitches there's some transcendence, it is the assertion of poetry and exhuberance that this game continues to give to the soul.

And then there's Maddux, the greatest pitcher of his, or any, time. How does one even begin to explain him? That's for another time. Sometimes he has seemed to me the lone man, surrounded and beset on all sides (after all, he is a Cub), but as a pitcher he is pitiless.

They deserve better. This team is embarrassing.

heat

2006-07-19T18:05:00.000-04:00

Well, the shit's really hitting the fan in Lebanon but let's talk about really important things: House Republicans want to make sure the Pledge of Allegiance will be free of pesky Consitutional challenges by making it impossible for Federal Courts to rule on the Pledge's legality.

That doesn't create a dangerous precedent.

Why on this green earth would anybody create a bill of such nonsense? There is no attack on God greater in this country than the blanket oppression of the poor and working class and the unelected president's war in Iraq. Meanwhile, House Republicans want to make sure that Evangelicals know that old God is going to be protected, by them.

Does God need protecting? Does perhaps the child of a single mother growing up in East New York need maybe just a little bit more protecting? How about that 19 year old kid from West Virginia just going back to Iraq for his third tour of duty? Might he need a little bit more of God's help, our help and anybody's help, than the Pledge of Allegiance does?

260 morons in the House ruled that one branch of government should be allowed to put restraints on the Constitutional duties of another branch, it's another proof that this society has passed on from democracy into a nether state of something else. This something else is mostly plutocracy and some weird pseudo-philosophical idea that the free market as it exists in America should be the blueprint for government to follow.

Meanwhile, Lebanon shudders.

Tyre, one of the larger towns in Lebanon, has been hit harshly and that has been particularly painful for me because Tyre has always been one of those magical places for me, a kind of touchstone for my historical imagination. Heroditus visited Tyre and wrote that it had been founded somewhere around 2750 B.C., it's conquerors include Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Marmeluks and finally the Ottomans. Like Palermo, Tyre's beauty, its importance and its perseverence have been proved by the numbers of its conquerors. Alexander transformed the city in his seige of it, after seven months he could not conquer the island that was much of Tyre so he built a causeway to it and finally was able to topple its walls; Tyre's most famous voice perhaps belongs to William of Tyre, who chronicled the Crusades and wrote much on Peter the Hermit. He was also responsible for discovering of Baldwin IV, the boy who would shortly be king of Christendom's Kingdom of Jerusalem, that Baldwin was leperous. William's rises and falls in political and religious fortune hint at the labyrinths of conspiricies and fates that seem to define the city.

The city is now crooked teeth of fallen buildings and burning trucks.

There is a lot of talk of assigning blame and of what to do with the militant Hizbullah, but what is scariest is the steadily eroding support for peace in the populations of Arab states more willing to practice some measure of diplomacy with Israel.

Regardless of what happens, what seems certain is that moderate Arab states like Jordan and Egypt will have lost some needed prestige and Iran will be the happy recipient of the gain. It's hard not to see Iran's hand in all that's happening, and in their actions, they've put pretty much everybody besides Russia in an uncomfortable place.

Bush chews on a buttered roll and talks about Assad and Syria putting pressure on Hisbullah, but as usual he's talking around the real problem. While some have argued that Iran has played a muted role n this crisis, it's not difficult to imagine that Hizbullah needed at least tacit support before kidnapping those two Israeli soldiers, and while the other countries in the Arab world have called to rein in the spectre of violence, Iran has extolled the virtues of fighting against the "Zionists".

So there's the possibility of another intifada as well.

Here the rain has just started, it had been threatning to for hours, even half-starting. The air felt alive with occasional rumblings of thunder and half-hearted flickers of lightning; all afternoon it was dark and the wind would come to sudden life and then a stillness and the sounds of cicadas would be brought to a height and fade, everything rising and falling, the afternoon stretching out like a spilled drink. Now suddenly, the storm has broken from the leash, just before the dawn.

I haven't been able to sleep tonight, a dissatisfaction in my soul of some kind, a restlessness like one of those unassuming Poe characters occasionally got.

I'm off to look at the storm.

the new map

2006-07-17T12:14:00.000-04:00

They were like this with Nixon too. One of the odd things I have always wondered about was why people believe the Republicans are for limited government. If you ask self-defined Republicans what they believe in one of the first phrases to jump from their mouths is "small government". After all, the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Junior administrations have all been about completely unlimited and very large government.

Wire-tapping, price fixing, enemies list, illegal courts and extraordinary rendition, secret arms sales, break-ins, throwing journalists in jail and intimidation of journalists, corporate welfare both in terms of huge tax cuts and in terms of massive defense spending, attempts, mostly successful at court-packing with idealogues rather than serious jurists, this has been anything but small government.

But you throw a few phrases around, project an image and it's amazing what people will think.

I think there are two really big reasons that people tend to identify the Republicans as defenders of limited government even though they are the very opposite of that definition.

First, the Republicans, running on this ticket have had more success in national elections than, until recently, in congressional elections, therefore, they have pressed their advantage in the electoral branch to maximize what political power they have. Having now had not a small success in these congressional elections they have failed to change their mindset and instead have adapted and adopted to this "the president is always right and it's patriotic to support the president" nonsense because it's what they've been developing since Eisenhour. That's why the Monica Lewinsky scandel was exactly what they needed and why it resonated so loudly in Republican corridors during the Clinton presidency. They now had reason not to support the president (who is always right) because he had disgraced the office and was "unfit for command" and thus they could avoid looking too obviously like hypocrites; having in essence developed a cult of personality approach (and Bush the Elder was always only lukewarmly supported because he failed to cultivate this approach to leadership the way Nixon, Reagan and afterwards The Younger did), it was more important to tarnish character than policy in trying to recover and solidify their base (especially for fund-raising).

This is not to say that no reasons existed to oppose Clinton's policies, from either side of the aisle. The 1996 Federal Communications Act that he so championed is one of the worst pieces of crap ever to come from this government and his failure to enact new healthcare legislation was a failure born of amazing arrogance by those he allowed to take the helm on that issue. Only on the second issue were the Republicans in any opposition, citing cost, philosophy and mostly resorting to labeling and name-calling in their opposition. Sadly, their actions during the health care debates, dumbing down the debate, avoiding real issues and defending the rights of the richest four or five percent of the country in the name of the middle class only set the blueprint that they used so successfully in 1994 and again in 2000, 2002 and 2004. On the other hand, it's safe to say that on policy, Clinton was more successful, more knowledgeable and more prescient than the current president, but that has nothing to do with Republican perception of leadership.

I have already touched on the second reason that the Republicans have managed to define themselves as exactly what they are not. Neither party is for small government, but the Republicans have been quite successful at defining where big government exists. It doesn't exist in the defense industry, doesn't exist in writing legislation that restricts competition and maximizes competitive advantage for the huge corporations who usually have a hand in writing the legislation, doesn't exist in creating a war without justifiable reason, no it exists in student loans and grants, it exists in WIC and estate taxes, it exists in the activist judges continued support of constitutional protections for flag-burners, abortionists and the gays. The Republicans have managed to make voting for them a kind of referendum on cultural issues rather than actually about any policy.

Vote for us, they say, and the gays won't make a mockery of marriage having orgies at discoes in New York and LA, the immigrants and the various coloreds won't be sitting around smoking crack, having babies and collecting your money and loose girls won't be having abortions every five minutes because they couldn't keep their legs crossed. Vote for us and you will have the America you grew up with. Meanwhile, they have advocated torture and the breach of fair trial.

But now, in the wake of 9/11 that idea of the America you grew up with, whatever it actually was, has amazing resonance. Nobody wants this world of potential falling beams and now two very large beams have crumpled back to earth, sending souls leaping from their sides. In terms of images, no image has helped the Republican cause more than that image of those two towers sinking into the hard rock of Manhattan's Financial District, any image of Guantanimo Bay pales in effect for most Americans. That a Republican president failed to acknowledge the coming crisis of 9/11 at any point until the afternoon after the morning of 9/11, that his response has completely failed to make accountable those people who were responsible for 9/11 and that his policies have only had the effect of making it more likely that more 9/11s will occur and that those same policies have taken us farther away from that previous America does not matter in the referendums held since then. What matters is that people feel safer with Republicans because Republicans appear to support more strongly the world that existed before 9/11. Many people who supported Bush cited the idea that they felt they felt safer with him, an absurdity, but that's the point. They felt safer with him because he represented not safer actions, the opposite in fact, but more importantly, he represented an America that would hold onto values that seemingly had no relation to this new and uncertain future. And he also was the president, and you support the president in a crisis, that's being a good American; there are no Monica Lewinskys to drag foolish words from his lips and make him look "unfit for command". The image he has projected, a man clumsy with words, working with his hands on his ranch, those have been carefully orchestrated traits and actions (along with many others) to send a message to those voters who pick up on images more forcefully than they do matters of policy, that this is a man who will fight for their idea of what America is. When it comes to matters of policy, his message has been much more muddled than it has been on projecting what kind of personality he is. This image was amazingly successful up through the 2004 election and even into 2005. Unlike Reagan, the confluence of world events has undone him, unlike Reagan, he is largely responsible for these events.

Many strategists have argued that values actually did not tip the scales to the Republicans in the presidential race and up until now the Congressional races held since 9/11. I believe this is wrong. The pollsters who have come to the conclusion that they initially misidentified a key component in the Bush victory in 2004, as well as the continued Republican hold on Congress, actually were right, but they failed to identify the marriage of values to image, allowing people who have been adversely affected by Republican policies to more easily able to latch onto one issue, one value, or one image to justify their voting choice. How else to explain West Virginia or Southern Ohio? How else to explain Florida?

Many Americans are increasingly finding solace in what they are not, rather in what they are. And this has impacted how they vote and what they choose to identify as key reasons to vote a certain way. It may be less flattering to say of these voters that they are also slightly turned on, in terms of interest of course, by issues like homosexuality, abortion and deviance and law. Though the attempts at authoritarianism have failed miserably to protect Americans or their rights, a bunch of thugs who look like dads and grandpas have had tremendous success on projecting these images. But as Wallace Stevens wrote, "not ideas of the thing, but the thing itself". Anyway, there was a man for you, old Wallace.

a young philosopher in Hartford - and an amazing poet - Wallace Stevens

getting ready to perambulate

2006-07-12T16:10:00.000-04:00

So why do I suddenly feel that the CIA will be taking over the interrogation of all dangerous prisoners?

Well, just at first blush, they don't get any mention in that little White House Directive that said the military would, after all, be following that Geneva Convention, and I don't doubt it. As a matter of fact, I imagine sometime in September or October that Guantanimo will be thrown open to the press and damn if the prisoners won't have their own little mosque and some decent grub.

Not too good, don't want to desert the base by offering dessert or even fruit cups, but hell, nobody ever got too upset by seeing a prisoner eat an apple.

"The Base", that phrase, ironically enough, is thrown around when discussing Republican attempts to hold onto their iron-fisted grip on power and it refers to the "values" voters who apparently believe posting the ten commandments in courts and keeping the gays from marriage is more proof of values than say, not torturing people and making sure that all populations in this country are served by decent health care and protected from the catostrophic economic effects of sudden sickness or injury (just to start...). Joe Lieberman is finding out the hard way that there's a new base, and like all dinosaurs he's big and ugly from the perspective of power to bear, but slow to react or act in any way that acknowledges that things have changed.

And the new base forming on the Left, half-in and half-out of the Democratic Party is willing to stake control of the Senate on this race because their support for the Democratic Party is so tepid that they're not too worried one way or the other who owns the power between the two parties.

I don't know if this is the wisest idea, perhaps letting the dinosaur huff and puff a few more years is equal trade to make sure that the Democrats can stamp out a good many of the Decider's decisions for the judiciary. Perhaps force some investigations and etc. Maybe they could spend a little less time voting against flag burners.

On the other hand, it's not like Hilary Clinton, that bastian of the Left Dinosaurs did anything but support that and Joe Lieberman is such a moron, and so distasteful, that sending a message of accountability to the politicos who have offices on the Hill might be nice; a hard slap to at least one of the hands held out for a hand-out from the deep chests of antithetical interests might be instructive.

And getting a politician on the Hill who rose in such a way might encourage more of a revolt elsewhere. Anywhere at this point. Here, in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, where I'm spending the month of July, things are just fine as far as most people are concerned. Water the lawn, mow the lawn, fertalize the lawn, that's pretty much the rhythm. Meanwhile, a child born 20 miles from here, in Chicago, is three times as likely not to see her first birthday and if she survives she is around eight times more likely to suffer from lead poisoning.

the Italians are no champions

2006-07-10T04:59:00.000-04:00

"How could he let his team down like that and not be focused on the win?"
"Would Michael Jordan do that with a championship on the line?"

Two good questions asked by friends while watching the World Cup, but I don't give a fuck, Zidane is brilliant, the Italians are weasels. Zidane has been provoked before, earned many a yellow and a few red cards in his career, including during important games, this was something worse for him and for those of us who have gloried in his brilliance. This was a setting of a sun obscured by smoke, clatter and disquiet.

Flip Bondy, that moron of the sportsdesk, suggested that Zidane is a thug, a genius who, "as we all know" has the "problem genius has, which is that it lies too close to madness". Or some nonsense like that. Reductive and idiotic, as most such pronouncements will be.

Zidane is no freak. No hot-head. Never been arrested for hitting his girl or getting in a fight at a diner, or any of the other sad et ceteras that mar football and baseball. Never cut off his ear. Unlike the Italians, he has never been accused of being in the fix. No, he is the rarest of things, a poet. Look at his play, so precise, so sound, so exact and so beautiful, with an unerring sense of tempo - never have I seen such balance in sport. A thug? No, that's somebody who looks to provoke, to shift the balance from competition to aggression - an instigator. If you win not on your strengths but on another's vulnerability that lies outside the zone of competiton, then many will refuse to call you champion. Instead, I can only call the Italians opportunists.

Many, if they bother to read this, will disagree with me for saying this, but I don't care. If Zidane was provoked, and he most certainly was, you can talk all you want about the mental part of the game and the keeping focus or et cetera all you want - it's bullshit. If the game is all that matters then it is also all that matters in the measuring - on that then, Italy would have no prize. You cannot say the same for Jordan or the Bulls. Can you imagine asking of Michael Jordan what ethnic slur he used to get a player out of his groove? Or ask him if the constant elbowing and nipple tweaking was what put the Bulls over the top? Nipple tweaking. Sure, Zidane should be above being taunted about his Algerian heritage, should be above the constant elbows the Italians rained upon him and the nipple tweaking as well. After all, his game has nothing to do with that drivel, his game is the poet's verse, the composer's tempo. Why resort to more vulger tones and shades? Why abondon the beautiful for the prosaic? The game is not all for Zidane, it's that simple. Perhaps the game was all for Jordan, who knows? But this much is true, it took the Italians insults, wheedling, and harassment to "win" the World Cup. To degrade yourself for victory is to lose the victory its meaning. Nipple tweaking. If you need to resort to a constant stream of hate and nipple tweaking to achieve victory, just take it, set fires in celebration and leave.

A friend of mine asked me if Jordan would ever give up a championship to defend his own honor? No, I replied in a text message, but so what? Without honor, victory is meaningless. As much as I love Jordan, and I do, Zidane to me represented something deeper, if both of them with the distillation of process into art, then Zidan's distillation was more complex, less about the black and white of victory and defeat that drove Jordan so and more about the music that makes the whole thing.

The saddest thing about this World Cup is that a poet of the beautiful game resorted to the mundanity of violent response too often inspired by hate, insult and tawdry ambition. WIthout his poetry Zidane is simply one of us, another guy getting angry at somebody on the highway who's cut him off. Zidane is better than that, the Italian "Champions" are not. Any libation from that tarnished cup will be bitter, and if drunken to the lees, fatal. For Zidane, the bitter aftertaste will be the knowledge that when it was most necessary, he ignored what was through him, the music of the spheres.

annoyed, catty

2006-07-07T02:40:00.000-04:00

Drove back to Chicago today. It was a pleasant drive, save the last fifty or so miles of Pennsylvania, which are always a slog.

So, I get home and check the baseball and news, and what's there? some shit-head writing about how it would be terrible and send the wrong message to her fragile daughters (and by proxy others, I suppose/she supposes) if J.K. Rowling kills off ol' Harry...meanwhile little things like North Korea playing erector set and Iraq devolving into My Lai (aka Pinkville) along with another explosion in oil prices and inflation are becoming a real concern for some outside Dreamworld. For the first time in a few weeks, I wrote a letter doomed to be unpublished save here - I'm sure you can find the article I'm responding to reprinted in full somewhere, or email me for a copy of it...how I hated it! I stereotyped a little, the Park Slope brigade of parents...but they don't care, they're rich and I'm not:

To Whom It May Concern,

Your new columnist, Judith Warner, is terrible. I will not read her column again. Ever. Not even for money. Why do you publish this when there are plenty of intelligent people out there who could write something off the cuff better than this "oh what a complex and frightening world for my daughters...and ME, a gamely battling mother!" spew.

The last thing I want to see when I open the opinion page of the New York Times is some puff peice about what a crazy world it is since 9/11. Really?

I hadn't noticed.

Then, to top it off, in this column which stinks of privilege, Warner goes on some inane rant about what J.K. Rowling should do in the final Harry Potter book, or so I deciphered, it was kind of sketchy. Was she demanding, pleading or just being a typical overbearing Park Sloper who knows best? Why doesn't she write her own books for her daughters then? They could be about super-heroes who always win in the end and everything is better than it was ever before! Really, there should be little lobbying in art (especially if it comes unpaid or unasked), if Michelangelo wants to carve in ice, let him, if J.K. Rowling wants to make a martyr of Harry, well, Harry (like Little Dombey for Dickens), is from her heart, her imagination and owes his flesh and blood to her labors; if Ms. Warner wants to bring Pollyanna back from the deep-freeze, I'm all for her rolling up her sleeves, she could enlist the help of Mr. Snow, the current administration's spokesmen. Or she could just rip out the pages in her copy of the book, if the feared event that can't be named comes to pass. Regardless, what world is she in to say that a work of fiction must necessarily be something or threaten the worlds imagined by children?

Warner's rules of fiction for her daughter, who was terrified of narrative fiction (!), were dispiriting. Most of the great books for children are not so simplistic as she dreams, sadly, some owies are bigger than any band-aid and sometimes rising against will have to suffice, because rising above is not in the cards (Louis Lowry's Number the Stars, for example, or if she venture into the terrifying world of non-fiction, a particular diary). Witness even in the Great Brain series, bad things sometimes happen and there's no going back.

Just like the Election of 2000 and 9/11.

Other not-so-simplistic narratives for the young reader that Ms. Warner will want to shield her daughters from include the powerful StarGirl by Jerry Spinelli, A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck and, of course, Charlotte's Web by the amazing E.B. White. Children have the ability and the right to know that the world is more complicated than winning and losing, and also of being exposed to new ideas, not always positive, about the world. Innocence is not spoiled by knowledge, it is spoiled by lies.

Anyway, please try something else on the editorial page, anything! Take a page from Dave Eggers and interview people in odd places, like his Voices of Katrina. Have something written by a disaffected school teacher. Draw pictures. Anything is better than this Newsweek-worthy schlock. And tell Ms. Warner about this hero out there who faces bad people and always wins, her name is Nancy Drew.

Whatever it takes.

best and warmest wishes,

Andrew Decker

billy wilder

2006-07-05T04:23:00.000-04:00

The air conditioner broke at Time Warner Cable and everybody was grumpy. Everywhere I looked on the third of July I saw girls crying on boys' shoulders and in the Time Warner Cable office this old guy held onto a box and over and over again, wiped the sweat off his bald head. It was moist in there. Took an hour and fifteen minutes to give them the cable box, the remote and the internet router, tools of the modern apartment, and then out the door and up to the Apple Store on 5th Avenue.

That thing is underground, it has kind of a Louvre thing going, people could take the stairs but they were waiting for the elevator and blocking the stairs. A flow problem. New York City is one big flow problem.

The trains have been working relatively painlessly on the plus side, it would be almost boring but everytime I seem to get on a train there's a crying couple, everybody's self-conscious at those moments. Why is she crying? Is he a jerk? Has something terrible happened? What? The whole drama and there's no program.

Today the United States celebrated its independence from England, I stress the last because in terms of independence, most of our elected officials seem about as independent as the fingers from the hand taking the pay-out. The latest sham anger at the press is only the latest in a disturbing and disgusting effort to make dissent the scapegoat for the sins of this administration.

I've skipped fireworks, which I love for any reason, for the last few years because it's hard to celebrate our country's existence when we're killing tens of thousands of innocent people for no reason really, except that our president and his vice have certain ideas about the world leading them to the conclusion that it's not murder if you can call the victim a terrorist. That fifteen year old girl who was raped, had her body lit on fire and was killed with the rest of her family certainly might have been a terrorist, she's from the right neighborhood and she makes the right amount of money to fit in our conception of terrorist. They also suffer from the delusion that this is a democracy because they held a vote...you can see the logic.

Or you can see its absence anyway.

I didn't suffer or declare a hunger strike though, I watched a couple Billy Wilder films at Film Forum. One directed, one just written with Howard Hawks directing - Howard Hawks is no slouch. The first, directed by Hawks, was Ball of Fire, which was a lot of fun, it was also, besides the convivial nature of the collegues, a perfectly accurate depiction of the academic world as far as I could tell. Barbara Stanwyk was perfect, as she always is, always the suggestion that she's the smartest one there...

The Major and the Minor was also a lot of fun, a kind of accidental Lolita made out of a grown woman put in a military school - a fish out of water like Kool Aid Man at a wine tasting. It really was fun, the spectre of World War II about to be played out gave it an odd feeling of poignance.

Billy Wilder is so wonderful because there is no pretension in his work at all, he really focuses on the story to almost an insane degree, the best example is his handling of Double Indemnity. One of the problems I have with James Cain as a writer is he tends toward moralization, but in Wilder's hands the story, retaining all the sense of nemesis that is everywhere in Cain, veers from condemnation (you can point to Barbara Stanwyk's character, but even in her last scene there's no sense of justice being done, only a certain path followed to one of its natural conclusions) toward curiosity, and this allows the last scene between Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson (who is always amazing) to be one of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema. Wow, what a scene!

There are no scenes like that in the movies I saw today, but there are some amazing moments - any moment Barbara Stanwyk turns on the seduction is a moment to really sink into and watching Dana Andrews turn on the ham is always fun as well. Movies can be so wonderful, why are movies like Superman Returns made? That tired old movie without suspense and barely a reason for being beyond the profit motive depresses me so much when the medium has so much potential to fill the soul with life. Going through the motions is bad enough in a three minute pop song, but in a two and half hour bloated beached whale of a movie, it's simply agony. Perfunctionary humor, perfunctionary action, perfunctionary plot, it's as safe as an office park and tastes like aspirin.

Some moron critics talked about how the director wanted to make an icon out of Superman. Gee, that's some kind of goal, seeing as you're starting with the iconic figure of Superman. Thanks for making a movie pal. That's deep an all, but little things in a popcorn movie count, like suspense and plot, for instance. Never, and this is saying something because I don't think I've ever even thought of her, have I cared LESS about Lois Lane than I did while I was watching her. Really. I thought, why doesn't Superman just find somebody else? ANYBODY else. Other women would date him and not win Pulitizers for articles about how the world doesn't need him. Never have I imagined the ungratefulness shown by Lois Lane after Superman saved her life by stopping her plane from crashing.

It was like he never flew down from space, avoided chunks of plane and single-handedly stopped her plane from crashing into a baseball diamond at about Mach 2. Her son owes his mother to this Man of Steel and she can't get over the fact that he left to go back to Krypton a few years back. Could care less, luckily for everybody, though fat good it does old Sup, she cares more about the power outage. Why? It's never explained how she seems to think it's something more than a plain old power outage. What does she think it is? Why does she think it's so important? Because nobody can give her a straight answer? Because the story needs her to be interested? And I hate to say this, but the kid actor was one of those terrible kid actors like Sam in Diff'rent Strokes...the fine line between obnoxious and cute is explored in microscopic detail and at some point obnoxious wins and then starts bragging.

The story was apparently written by a committee after doing a study entitled "Successful Components of High Grossing Movies" and really, the piano scene has to be seen to be believed in its awful patness. I was in an agony of suspense to find out if it was going to be as predictable as I imagined it would be and in the end it was somehow more predictable, to the point where it felt somehow defeated by the weight of its own celluloid. The film itself seemed to ask, "do we have to go through these motions? Or can we simply assume them?"

In Ball of Fire I knew the boy would somehow win the girl, but the journey itself was full of all kinds of delights, sometimes it was a delight of the script, or the cinematographer, of the actor or actress, of a director's decision. Every scene was infused with the joy of telling a story that felt fun, absurd and optimistic. In contrast, Superman Returns was an exercise, something pasted together to insure profit. Of course the studio behind Ball of Fire wanted to make a profit, as much profit as it could, yet it succeeded artistically whereas Superman Returns was about as artistic a Celine Dion concert. Instead of relying on special effects and the idea that the audience will be impressed because it's supposed to be impressed, Ball of Fire offered character, story and action driven by the consequences of the story, rather than a story dependent on the needs of the CGI and accounting departments of a major studio, there was little, if any, self-satisfaction in it.

It also didn't appear to hold its audience in disdain.

I also saw The Devil Wears Prada. I bought the tickets for these movies on Fandango. Today I received a questionaire from Fandango. The questionaire was all about how much I had noticed the S-Class Mercedes in The Devil Wears Prada? What else is there to say?

Finally I saw The Road to Guantanamo, an odd film directed by the always compelling Michael Winterbottom. His Code 46 deserved to be seen by more people and his Tristam Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story was wonderful and life-affirming. This film, mixing the voices of men who were falsely imprisoned at Guantanimo Bay with acted recreations of their experiences allowed Winterbottom to accentuate what he felt were keys into the characters of these men who endured hell because of the political monstrousity of the current U.S. government. It was a difficult film to watch because it worked so well as propaganda against the United States, and that was shameful. Also, however, the recreations allowed one to avoid the questions raised by the movie by leading one to wonder about the legitimacy of the scenes just witnessed. How real was this? Was it just like that? More important questions were left behind at the disbelief of seeing this inhumanity in action. To what degree is this what Winterbottom wants us to imagine Guantanamo is like and to what degree is it an accurate portrayal of Guantanamo. Strangely enough, one doesn't have these questions rise up as to the nature of Solieri while watching Amadeus.

Anyway, the sentimentality of patriotism is so sham as to make me want to puke. It really comes out on July 4th and Memorial Day, these morons who have no trouble with a president who sends soldiers into harm's way without a defensible reason, oh right, weapons of mass destruction and torture, anyway, they get so sentimental about these same boys they've happily supported marching off into a madness of violence. Instead of getting sentimental, it would be great if they got real. This war is so sad, so misguided, I keep coming back to it like a stutter.

I should sleep. Tomorrow is all about preperations for the summer.

graduation day

2006-06-27T18:37:00.000-04:00

I woke up troubled again. Dreams I can't quite remember when I wake up, but dark whatever they are and I'm longing for the desert in a way I haven't in awhile.

The ride up on the subway was peaceful, the L did its usual "we're not going to stop at your stop" but today the difference was there was another train within five minutes or so, so it could have been worse. I ended up at a 116th Street off the 1 feeling kind of disoriented, I don't get uptown often and it's this whole other New York I'm usually only vaguely aware of. Today though it was beautiful. The color was just right, a kind of bright gray that suited Columbia and Barnard perfectly and I went to Riverside to see my kids graduate during this day of supressed sunlight.

I graduated fifteen years ago, I thought about that while I walked up to the church at 120th and Riverside. A lot's happened but in the end, regardless, it's fifteen years. I remember we had ours in the gym and it was hot, airless, and I could have cared less about being there. My father felt weak with the heat, Dennis Park gave a speech and I felt like I wished Lemke had given the speech, at least it wouldn't have been a cliche, but those things feel doomed to be cliches.

Really what I think about when I think about my graduation is the night before. There'd been a big group of people hanging out, maybe by Adam's, anyway, afterwards, Terhune and I were driving around, and as happens when driving around aimlessly for a couple hours, talk turned to the bigger issues. We kept coming back to the idea that life was about to get better, after all, high school sucked unbelievably, it really did, especially the hours. Some morons, you can tell, talk in warm, oaky tones about the glow of those old high school days - oh yeah! Overwhelming fear of rejection, rejection, hours of homework, getting up at 6:30 (or more like 6:58) so I could be out the door by 7:10, pep rallies to cheer our tormentors, fear of zits, zits, minimum wage jobs that ate up the weekends as if they were hyperactive children with pez dispensers (us) and an all-pervading fear of failing to measure up. Good times! And I left so much out...

But the most amazing friends. And Terhune and I driving around talking about what was next, often Terhune would register his amazement that God hadn't taken him out for sport, and then we were making fun of the bastards and looking to turn right on Kensington near where later Terhune would prop up the headless roadkill, the light had turned green but for whatever reason I checked to my left and seemingly out of nowhere an 18-wheeler looking like 30 was going 70 and whooshed right by, the Malibu shuddering, the Jimi Hendrix Experience singing "Red House" on the 8-track and we'd almost bought the farm. To me that was the end of high school.

But today was the end for many of my students and they were beautiful. I knew this kid when I was in high school, he was the kind of kid you wanted to be like, he wasn't popular, he was admired. I was never really his friend, I was too messed up for that, he was one of those together kids who awed me with their early onset of competence, meanwhile I was getting detention for forgetting to bring in forms, or I was looking longingly at all these girls who couldn't remember me now if they tried and couldn't then either. Once, somebody I know ran into one of those girls at a charity golf outing that my friend was helping run. Cameron Jenkins, the aforesaid one of the "one of these girls" was asked if she remembered me. "Yes," she said absolutely blankly, "I think I do." We didn't know the first thing about these girls but would often construct ideas on them based on the flimsiest overseen pretexts and observations. Anyway, one of my students really reminded me of Stan Steck but it took until today to realize it. Raul. What an amazing person. Another kid, it took an extra year, Luther, I taught in my first year, I think he'll be the last one from my first year to graduate. I was sitting way in the back but I could see his smile from there. Then there was Iris, with the kindest heart and Roseline who made me laugh all the time and Rafael who wears his talent so casually that I often wonder how he'll harness all of it. There was Carla, who tore me up once when taking one of my tests, she was so frustrated she left the room in tears, she always never once appeared to think another kid was beneath her taking notice, something you notice if you've been the other kid, and then Jodi who, like all geniuses, is insatiably curious and kept taking my books and returning them without me noticing either way for the better part of a year. Some of these kids I'll never see again.

It's a bit like a crash in that it's a sudden stop. It's everyday and than it isn't.

Leaving graduation, there's a lot of pictures. For these kids, unlike for me, it wasn't necessarily expected or even particularly encouraged they'd end up even this far. The school graduates about half of the students who enter in any given year, it's been that way for awhile, walking back to the subway I thought about the other kids, who had been off doing other things today.

fun with the bastards

2006-06-26T20:56:00.000-04:00

There rarely has been a name so fitting as Peter King's is, the New York Republican and Representative is all in a tizzy because the New York Times published a story about terror networks, banking and the United States Government once again spying on everybody without all the hassles of following the law.

Really, everywhere you look hardly anybody likes democracy anymore. We prefer instead the tyrannies of suspician, fear, hatred and stereotype. You can't even burn a flag anymore without everybody acting like you've just gone on and declared jihad or had a homosexual marriage or something. P. King, brought out the tiresome ax of the New York Times as Liberal Elite Agenda Setters but don't you know sir, that job belongs to Kos now and already people are making money on that front. Nah, this was just good old fashioned journalism with the added caveat that the New York Times let the government know what it was doing. Well, Peter King wants the Government to sue.

After all it's a war.

A war of our own making, but a war regardless. Oh sure, if some flag-non-burner came across this somehow he might fidget and fuss and talk about 9/11 but that's like talking about the Bears chances at a Cubs game.

I'm all for containment when we talk about nut-bars on the Korean peninsula because I've seen Japan and liked it, why have it nuked twice? As well, it's always nice to make nice with China before this becomes a cluster-fuck with a barbie-lovin' scotch-swillin' dictator involved who actually HAS atomic capabilities (and that sounds so '50s: "atomic capabilities" that I just want to sit here and think about ray guns and zombies for a minute), one way to do that might be to ask them to help set some limits before Seattle is buying bottled water and digging shelters, and then maybe, enforce them? It's easy to be for active diplomacy, even if it festers, falters or perhaps fails; in working the diplomacy the successful diplomat is working with others as well, many who are sane, and it helps build things like cohesion, unity, things that tend to create actions based not on abstractions and desires of a reality-to-be, but actual reality, and occasionally, however rarely, actual facts.

But we've pissed away our democracy (no pun intended Mr. King), and the vultures of the Government are out there looking to turn people's heads this way and that way and any way away from things that might matter even a little - little things like governance, corruption, greed and classism. This is a government at war with the poor and at war with the idea that government has any role to play but as the footservants and ushers of wealth.

It's all very good for Warren Buffet to leave us some money, to be distributed in an approved manner to the poor who will still be poor, and that's better than nothing, I think, but, like that guy in the 1790s who was richer than everybody else in Virginia, who freed his slaves, it didn't suddenly make the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, or anybody else for that manner start suddenly releasing their slaves, it's the rare pharoah after all, who lets people go, don't expect the Abramoffs, Skillings and other assorted bastards suddenly friendly caretakers of the poor. They're too busy taking us for all we're worth.

Anyway, I was just annoyed, it's humid again in New York, which is kind of like saying it's New York, and the trains are a pain in the ass lately, but no more so than usual, except there was a cranberry bottle rolling around the car today filled with piss and, one hopes, a little vinegar.

been awhile // goings-ons

2006-06-23T03:21:00.000-04:00

Reading Celine's Journey to the End of the Night right now, it really doesn't get much better.

Otherwise, the news is mostly stressed though instead of thinking about how I have to move and find out if I have a job I end up thinking about those soldiers in Baghdad who were kidnapped and tortured over the weekend while Dick Cheney gave a little roast for Rummy during the reunion of Ford Administration appointees right here in New York (and some Daily News guy was given an award by the group for his coverage of White House affairs! What a surprise, it's like getting an award for being a sycophant). So ol' Dick was yukkin' it up about how Rummy was only the SECOND BEST Secretary of Defense ever (D.C. himself once served that venerable post!) and they were eating swell and meanwhile another couple soldiers found the monsters and were dumped into the twilight in some neighborhood, ringed with traps designed to further desecrate their 20-something bodies if the marines came in too fast.

Something strange is going on in Miami and I won't be too surprised to find out that the plot to terrorize America will become a few conversations, a shared living space and some odd ideas coupled with some fledgling and clumsy attempts to reach out and find some boom materials. FOX will treat it as a kind of Defcon 2 moment with the President of the United States coaching actively to insure our safety and meanwhile in reality the bastard's simply on the sidelines while the House makes sure the real players get as much money as they can stuff into their pockets. Seriously, why not just make the House chambers a big wind machine where rich men can come and grab at money awhile. At least mess up their hair a little.

The liberal blogosphere apparently has a network ("the Townhouse") where they kind of keep in touch and decide what to emphasize and what to bury -- pathetic. One of them was going after some profits illegal, he must have figured why not see what the Republicans are getting all excited about? Found out he liked it and got investigated, so now they're trying to bury the story and you have to wonder why? Don't they get it, transparancy allows you to move ahead faster, because now the questions are going to be about the action, and not just the action where you can regret your mistake, look forward to moving on and not acting so thoughlessly like an asshole in the future, but you spend another year and a day answering questions about the cover-up. Anything with moving parts breaks...a cover-up usually has lots of moving parts because it's attempting to create an alternate reality, which is kind of like making skin.

Good luck with that fuck-os..

A brief note about my students...I've been lucky this year to have such a wonderful group of studenten -- it's not even summer but I miss having them around. I learned a lot from them this year, I feel lucky to have a job where there is so much to think about, all the time.

Walking up Bedford:

Me at the school:

tired, absent from the scene...

2006-06-08T22:00:00.000-04:00

Today I ran around City College taking care of teacher certification crap, it could have been worse, but when they told us to go to the registrar's, it was weird to see it being torn down.

It's been a busy last few weeks, hard to make time to think, much less write anything here, and excitement has been in short supply. The Cubs are terrible, inflation is up and the president is talking about gay marriage, meanwhile the fearless Hillary Clinton is supporting an anti-flag burning amendment.

That's it for now...but soon I'd like to write...

Mission Impossible?

2006-05-17T02:22:00.000-04:00

For years now it seems the Left has been blaming Bush for all the fires that have been started since that day he stood deer-in-the-headlights in front of the nation at some Texas Courthouse and told everybody he was president. It seems like decades ago actually.

But the Left, after the weak-kneed and half-hearted approach Bush took to his immigration speech/policy, must be thinking now that there are larger forces to be tamed and that Bush, rather than a cause of these fires, is really only a product of them.

It must be bad if in some ways I agree with many of the principles of Bush's speech: it is common sense to insure that our borders are adaquetely protected, and at some level the steady stream of people crossing the border without papers indicates that these borders are not safe, and the occasional story of horrible deaths of these people who are crossing at the hands of these coyotes who guide them only illustrate the generally callous nature of these coyotes and what I would assume to be a willingness to guide anybody over the border for the right price. Extra enforcement of the borders at some level makes sense.

But it also illustrates the problems that Bush's moronic decisions have forced us into -- where the money for this? Where the manpower? Where the credibility for anything he says? These are only problems to begin with.

Then there's his willingness to allow illegal aliens to apply for citizenship, a move I strongly agree with. But his proposal here is rightfully hated by the Left and wrongly hated by the Right. The path to citizenship is nigh impossible except for the most successful aliens and does really nothing to improve the lives of most of these estimated eleven million people who live in the United States. They deserve better.

The Right would believe that these people are hurting the country, bringing it down, nothing could be further from the truth. U.S. policy and policies the U.S. have supported have been generally terrible for most of the people in Latin America and have contributed greatly to the economic stagnation of Latin America and many of its social problems. Whether it has been CIA supported dirty wars or support for military dictators at the expense of democratically elected leaders or economic support for policies that have devalued currencies and sucked wealth out of Latin American countries, Latin Americans have much more to fear from us than we do from them.

As well, our bias against illegal aliens undoubtedly comes from a sense of identification; there is a clear sense that American identity and sense of itself is shifting with the influx of Latin Culture, and this has caused consternation, disguest and fear on the Right which has long held to the idea that Western European Culture as diffused through the Western European American immigrant experience must be the dominant culture in the United States. In many ways the fear on the Right with regards to immigration has been the sense that these immigrants are upsetting the balances in our culture that tilt to their idea of it. Somehow the Right has always felt that their idea of law and order, right and wrong, governance and society are the only possible ways to create a society that will not immediately become communist or worse, athiest.

Meanwhile, in their attempts to demonize the illegal immigrants they only give proof that their idea of democracy is "whatever tastes best on their palate". Countries that attract immigration tend to be dynamic and innovative and in return, society is less fixed, though not necessarily more economically mobile, at least in the short term.

The Right exists in a fiction that their worldview is not harmful and oblivious to the necessities of the Earth and of the various societies that inhabit it, their sense of power has no broad definition of responsibility in it. They justify this by pointing to the short term economic benefits that they gain from supporting particular policies and attempt to assure the larger populations that those populations are included in who benefits.

Meanwhile, on this point they have the support of most of the American people and they rally it by bringing up the spectre of fear and economic peril. We're in much more economic peril from the unchecked power of corporations that have only the next quarter's profits to guide their decisions.

Americans have not often been good at identifying what most threatens them...a lack of self-examination and only lip-service to the ideas of Hobbes and Locke joining with the traditional anti-intellectualism that runs through the population have together created a people unbelievably reactionary in regards to self-reflection.

We need borders that are safe, on the other hand, the best way to achieve that is to create good neighbor policies with Latin America that don't seek necessarily what's best for us immediately, but rather what's best to create a regional economy that doesn't chase people into the margins of our society where they can burrow into our consciousness as an imaginary threat because they are real ciphers in our society.

By playing to the emotions of the crowd, once again the Right has dumbed down the debate and misdirected the national conversation toward meaningless gestures and symbols. The question the Left has to answer is this, how do you capture a country's imagination and reason and direct it toward the necessary questions that would have us approach the real problems suggested by illegal immigration in our country rather than these false ones?

Who knew?

2006-05-02T23:48:00.000-04:00

I've never been able to sit through a whole Colbert report, I have to admit, though I love it. I get too frustrated; sadly, the show rings too true for me and I start getting annoyed and before long I'm looking to see what's on Turner Classics.

Having said that, I watched his speech at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner all the way through, and it was amazing and brilliant. It's easy enough to see on the web and it was fun to watch the president have to sit there like the moron he is. It was also wonderful to watch the lackadasical and lapdoggy press sit there and have to watch a comedian ask tougher questions than any of them (save Helan Thomas) have dared to ask.

I'm going to go back to watching Harold Lloyd now, but here's the link to watch it (it's in three parts): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcIRXur61II&search=colbert

subway horror

2006-04-27T23:01:00.000-04:00

Today on the subway I watched in horror as this woman picked her nose and then rolled the booger around in her hand and then appeared to put said booger on the guy next to her's jeans.

It was totally crowded and I was on the other side of the subway and I thought about it. What do you do in that situation? Yell. Look the other way? Say something aloud like some kind of tacky moral crusader: "Man! I would never ever pick my nose in public! And then place it on the person next to me's jeans. Ever." And then look out the window as if I was checking my hair in the fluerescent reflection.

She looked pretty indy, had a camera around her neck; she didn't look like she'd ever tried odd drugs or did dares. This is something I'm definately asking the studenten about.

Otherwise the day was pretty quiet and I'm blissfully unaware of what's happening politically this week. I've been making discs of 1920s and '30s music for my kids and watching pretty bad movies. I know the Fox News Guy Snow is now the Bush Administration Guy, but the only thing that's changed really in that equation is who his paycheck is from and how many people he'll reach. Less now. But the Democrats were enormously stupid again, trying to paint him as a critic of Bush which only might help to give Bush a dose of much-needed credibility. The Democrats are so incompetent they can't even work the satire of the Bush Administration turning to Fox "news" to their advantage. How do you fuck that up?

It's like spelling your name wrong.

I got a new phone. It's cool and all, but I haven't put people's numbers in it yet...the kids are obsessed with it. They've been telling me I need a new phone all year, and they had a point, the corner of the old phone kind of fell off, the numbers wore out and the frame was kind of separating, on the other hand, it was so functional. This one isn't quite as user-friendly, the phone-book is lame. But it has iTunes. Soon bread will have iTunes.

I've been listening to Love's Forever Changes pretty often. That album is spooky, but really brilliant. I like the horns, it really is the best Los Angeles record I can think of. You feel Los Angeles when you listen to that record. It's kind of like Wilco's Being There and Chicago or Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights and New York for me. Or the Velvet Underground and Nico or the Ramones or whatever for New York.

San Francisco to me is always Beulah's When Your Heartstrings Break because it's what I was listening to all the time when I was first there.

Back to looking up pictures for the history classes. It's almost a hobby.

thursday

2006-04-20T15:27:00.000-04:00

As far as a shake-up, McClellan's resignation and Roves "reduced" role was hardly an earthquake, and really, not even a tremor. There isn't going to be anything that ever fundementally changes about this administration because never has there been a more misguided presidency so certain that it alone knew the correct path.

Rove's position was taken over by one of his top disciples, a man who made his reputation by orchestrating a fake riot during the Florida confusion of November/December, 2000 and really, what more could you expect? And we can be sure that Rove will be attempting to play doctor to the ailing hopes of House and Senate Republicans as we appraoch the 2006 elections. The man is simply an oozing puss of slime, and he will spread his message of hate to willing and desperate ears throughout the country.

The great sin of this administration is hate. It believes in division and conflict. It believes in principles that are antithetical to a free society and nowhere is this more obvious than in the relatively small issue of homosexual marriage. I believe that the reason this caused such a firestorm politically over the last few years is a window into how those in the Bush Administration have managed to wrestle control from, if not people who believed in democracy, at least people with rational minds.

Most people support the administration's view on homosexual marriage, that it's wrong and an affront to morality. That's hate. Every American afraid of homosexual love is complicit in the war in Iraq because it's their fear which allows people like these to capitalize on the resulting hate and run it to its logical conclusions.

It's tortured logic that fears homosexuality and tortured logic that has chosen the policy of confrontation in a region that begs for engagement instead.

Some point to the Bible as the basis of their hate in much of the same way the administration pointed to the documents Colin Powell waved on the floor of the U.N. The Bible, as beautiful as it is, was written by men, perhaps occasionally enlightened by the Will of God, perhaps not. That is a mystery for God or the Lack but what is obvious, on any examination of the Bible is that even there God exists in many Forms as is not a coherent God for creating an ethic that can stand on its own. Everywhere in the Bible there is prejudice and fear, and that conclusion is only one possible interpretation of Christ's parable of the Samaritan, a man from a group much despised in the Bible. Man is responsible for his beliefs and cannot point to the Bible to excuse any hate that he has. It is his.

It's amazing how people select parts from the Bible that support their prejudices and say "there, that's the Bible", the entire damn thing. And because they have audiences, because they have power and because they don't challenge the traditional hatreds of humanity, they are believed. The Christian Right should be ashamed of itself for encouraging such hate. And in a world that demanded even all of Christ's courage (Gethsemane), for encouraging such fear.

And they talk about Muslims? They talk about Secular Humanism?

If poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them, as Marianne Moore wrote, then the Christian Right's world is a real garden full of imaginary dragons, but as Rilke pointed out, the dragons of myth need only love to be revealed as they are, the persons of our better half.

My uncle died. Much of his life was self-loathing, even self-revulsion, another part of it was fear, simply because he was gay. As Gandhi and Christ both showed, no matter how much love you show, there's always somebody there to insist on the triumph of hate, fear and ignorance. Those bastards, so self-righteous and disgusting, so able in spreading fear, have found a vulnerable group, and from focusing their hate on that group (of course, they wouldn't call it hate, they would say "we disagree with their choices" -- choices...wonderful) and from that agreement on hate and fear (the fear of being identified as "the other" which is why so many people that could give a fuck about anybody's "choices" are silent, because they DO care about being labeled as an other) it's easy to create a pattern. What right do they have to define my uncle's life according to their stunted standards of truth?

Millions of people in this country who nodded their heads at the words hammering home the idea that "sanctity of marriage" rested on the fact that it would involve sex between a man and a woman because after all in the apocryphal story of Adam and Eve there was "no Steve" as they like to point out, were also told, in the same days of this current mess that is engulfing the Mideast (Iraq, bin Laden still at large, the prospects of nuclear Iran and our own uncertain and unengaging policy, the call for European Muslims to go to Israel to blow themselves up, etc.) that what was happening needed to happen in terms of U.S. policy. We were confronting evil after all, and it could be trusted that we were thus "the Good". Confronting evil and making a stance for our "values" was the same theme of both messages, and both messages depended on the other for their logic.

In the days of the homosexual marriage controversy (February, 2004 - June, 2004) about the same percentage of people believed that the war in Iraq was misconceived as believed that homosexual marriage was acceptable. While faith in the war has eroded steadily with the continuing situation steadily deterioriting, support against gay marriage has reamained steady, which only shows you how little we have learned about the policies of hate as a people.

I despise the Christian Right because of its embrace of hate and division. It's belief that it is oppressed and it's self-righteous and Pharisaic approach to God which it believes justifies its prejudiced and hateful actions, for this reason most religious extremism is contemptible. Having said that, I despise no individual, but I reserve the right to despise the movements they follow. Religion is policy.

Outside of my parents, nobody taught me how to be a human being more than my uncle, I will hate forever any manifestation of that hate which forced him to feel such shame for his desires. There are so many Gods in the Bible because there are so many images of God; if there is divinity in the Bible, I like to think it is this, it is not what we desire to be that God is, but what we love. The other thing I like to take from the Bible is rather New Testament and it is this: there are no dragons. Evil, after all, is only made up of those things that take us away from love.

****************'

A lot of good and bad for the Cubs last night. D. Lee is obviously the big story, and I'm hoping his wrist is just bruised or else I don't want to think about what it means for the Cubs. Don Aardsma's disappointing appearance also was a major downer as well. He has great stuff, but he seems to freeze up when he's called up and suddenly he's wild or throwing flat. This is not a player you figure will blossom under Dusty, unfortunately.

Playing the Dodgers in a tight game is always nerve-wracking, because of that speed they have, it always seems like your a walk and a flare away from disaster.

*******************

"If I had sinned terribly the night before, next morning, well before dawn, you would see me crawling on my knees through the Stations of the Cross. I choke, I weep, I strike my face, my breast, my arms and legs, my hands. I bleed, I make the Sign of the Cross with my tears. At the end, God is taken in." --Max Jacob, in a letter to Marcel Jouhandeau
****
Present among us, giving tone to the little group, was Max Jacob, pessimistic and full of verve simultaneously, the Italian ceramist and sculptor Giovanni Leonardi, the painter and conservator at the Museum of Brest, Jean Lachaud, the writer and doctor Pierre Minet, my sister Henriette Bauguion, and myself, poet.

Now and then, Max Jacob, bitter, glancing back at his past and pining for his youthfulness of those years, would take from his breastpocket a worn daguerreotype photograph. Exhibiting it with emotion, he would say: "And here's the young man I was at 20!" He wasn't far from shedding tears, and ours as well were on the verge of overflowing our eyelids, knowing to what an extent life effaces all innocence.

Max Jacob had the fine head of a monastic bishop, and yet there nonetheless flashed forth at times, from behind his lorgnon, an incisive gaze, searching always for the fault in his interlocutor's speech. He was not at all only a little proud of his hands, saying that an artist must ostentatiously display these noble parts of himself. If for Dr. G. Desse the hand is a claw, for Max Jacob it was a kind of scepter, able to bless, create beauty, direct, command--a kind of device to uplift the soul toward God, in an offertory gesture.

One problem Max Jacob did not like to enter upon was the problem of Love. At those times he became silent, as if folded into himself, withdrawn. However he resolved this problem, it is certain that he never loved anyone absolutely, passionately and decisively. The Love of God was for him the only basis for the problem, human love being but an accident--and perhaps unfortunately for him, deviating from its normal course. Women had nothing to fear from him in this area--he treated them always as comrades, amiably.

This curious man, whose fashion of moving about through life was so original (and I am not only speaking of his physical comportment--which was the butt of laughter for the Quimper bourgeois, when they saw him strolling about on the city quays in a silk shirt and ragged shoes, for example--but also of his moral, intellectual and spiritual bearing), this man whom Paris was not far from considering a buffoon--for he put so much of the fantastic and occasionally such cynicism into his speech in order to ward off questions, in order to demonstrate the inanity of everything--was in the last analysis a very serious man, profound, mystical, and almost in despair because he could not demonstrate the proof of God before the skeptics, which proof was nevertheless demonstrated in his unquiet and tormented life. --Clotilde Bauguion

fun fun fun

2006-04-18T18:45:00.000-04:00

I was jumping up and down today because I had coffee on eight hours of sleep and thought wow, I can still jump pretty well, then I stopped and my right ankle started throbbing. Ah, prospects of the grave, the slow atrophy of the body and original sin.

Otherwise, it's been a pleasant day spent thinking about the prospects of the Republic and the earth in general. It was depressing to think about but it was sunny out.

Polar bears are getting thinner, oil is $72 a barrel (why? asked cnn.com -- well, do the math geniuses...what's Exxon's profits these days? How much oil is left...about three years to go before non-OPEC nations will be unable to keep up with their current output while demand will rise to about 90 billion barrels per day by the end of the decade and a few years down the road OPEC, which will have a couple decades of market dominance will also begin to find itself unable to keep up with demand) and Rumsfeld is proud of the decisions he's made as Secretary of Defense. What decisions could he be proud of? Does he give himself points for not wetting himself? Polar bears are drowning, we're running out of oil while whistling in the dark and Rumsfeld, the dark himself, thinks he's the cat's pajamas.

There's a lot of whistling in the dark these days, but it's getting shriller, more determined. It could be argued this is progress. With more people asking harder questions, it makes it all the more disappointing that there is no true opposition party in the United States. With the Democrats looking everyday more and more like the bloated Whigs of the 1830s and '40s and the major anti-Republican organizations like moveon.org offering only cautious rebuke of the plutocracy it appears that a potential turning point in progressive politics is being pissed away.

Kind of like the 1960s.

There is a sense in this country, and it runs deep, that if a person has money, they must not be that big a fool. Friends, Dick Rumsfeld is a rich, rich man. And Dick Cheney is enormously wealthy. And enough with the evil genius comparisons. It pays him too much credit. The man is an ass.

“The plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios. But with every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”
Dick Cheney

There's the evil genius on Iraq in the early days. Later on he had this one to say:

"I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." --Vice President Dick Cheney, on the Iraq insurgency, June 20, 2005

Genius, it can be argued, is the marriage of vision and understanding. The best that can be said of Cheney is that he has a decidedly strong survival instinct.

The day is sunny, Greg Maddux is still Greg Maddux and yesterday was a masterpiece at Dodgers Stadium, there's genius. Once Maddux was winning against the Astros 8-0 in mid August a few years ago. He grooved a pitch to Bagwell in the bottom of the 8th on a 2 and 2 count. Bagwell ripped it. A home run, not just a home run, a staggering shot, a little satellite of love to summer and the Braves won 8-1. A few weeks later Maddux faced Bagwell again in a much tighter game with all kinds of play-off implications, it was 3-2 Braves in the seventh or eighth inning and the Astros had two on. Again it was 2-2 and Maddux dropped a little hammer on Bagwell and made him look like a pig at a swan convention. Bagwell shook his head all the way to the dugout. Later he said he'd been looking fastball middle-in. When Maddux was asked about that at-bat, the key at bat in the game, he smilled a little but didn't say anything. Leo Mazzone did though, a bit later, on that at bat he mentioned that Maddux had set up Bagwell for it in AUGUST, weeks before that key at bat. He'd grooved that fastball on purpose to get Bagwell in a certain frame of mind. Bagwell is a smart hitter, and Maddux knew he'd remember what he hit on that 2-2 count. And weeks later, for that satellite of love, Bagwell paid heavy. There's genius. There's the greatest goddamn pitcher that ever walked out into the center of a diamond.

Happy Birthday Greg Maddux!

2006-04-14T03:52:00.000-04:00

I thought I was flying American Shuttle but I was actually flying Shuttle America and whoever heard of that? Down the hatch, up into the dark clouds and across the Lake and we landed with five kids yelling and me mouthing Hail Marys. It was a bumpy ride and I don't fly well.

Earlier I'd run around Brooklyn trying to make sure I had everything for the trip home but all the grand plans turned into a bunch of dirty laundry but I found this amazing sandwich place and the sun was warm and the leaves spring-small more radiated their color than were their color along the streets. A lot of people were off work today and were walking around looking at everything without any rushed sense of winter.

By the evening I was back in Andersonville with Corms talking about how much I hate Eric Milton and there was this cool thunderstorm, so Midwest and sudden, the wind blowing through the Edgewater and the lamps swaying, the specials cards flipping over and as suddenly it was over. The bark on the trees slick and the lights blurring the wet streets the only reminders of the storm. Late now, the air was still and you could feel the time. Driving home along Peterson it seemed like nothing had changed, the same hamburger joints and long rows of businesses with timelines that seem to have stopped around 1978, the same $4.99 Video sign, the same stupid light sequencing around Lincoln, it was mildly depressing and comforting.

Anyway. a lot of Neocons are comparing Iran's non-weapons grade enrichment of uranium to Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, for instance William Kristol in the Weekly Standard, however this is a tenuous analogy at best. I think there are very legitimate questions about Iran's motives, however, to call this moment one akin to 1936 presumes several dangerous assumptions. First, Hitler's action of occupying the Rhineland was actively infringing on France's nationhood, Iran's actions so far are not affecting borders or sovereignty (unless you can argue that they are asserting their own sovereignty). Second, Hitler's war machine was much closer to readiness in 1936 than Iran's nuclear energy policies are to producing a bomb they keep saying they don't want (but how much is their word worth?). The most dire predictions are three to five years (which would be about where Hitler was...), but most experts say that if the Iranians actually are looking to create a bomb, they're more likely at least 15 years away. Third, that Iran is actually another fascist Germany but all evidence about Iran points to Iran as being far more divided about what its government should look like than the Germans were in 1936. How consistent is Iran's policy actually going to be over the three to fifteen years? Germany's resolve was steady and fanatical, whereas Iran's actually is more difficult to read (though it is delicious to see the National Review arguing for support of labor unions, be they Iranian or otherwise in their shrill call to action).

Then there are the reasons to suppose this is a potential 1936. First, one can suppose that Iran, by announcing it has enriched uraniam to the point that it could be used for nuclear power, is testing the waters of Western response to its gently turning up the ratchet on its nuclear program. If we do nothing now, will the Iranians then be emboldened to act more forcefully to create nuclear weapons? Second, their government has been quite comfortable in supporting enemies of the United States and expresses often its wishes to destroy Israel. With nuclear weapons, they could exert a lot of force in the Mideast and we could see our first nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran. Third, just as the Germans capitalized on the tumultous political environment in the France of 1936, which was bitterly divided and politically self-destructive, so too are Iran's announcements and actions coming just as the United States is bitterly divided and politically self-destructive with the opposition party lost and without ideology and the ruling party with an ideology so inconsistant and illogical that it is quickly becoming a model of incompetence as well as being simply mean and contemptible.

Quickly, the actions of the Iranians are going to create a response by the United States which will further define Bush's presidency. Having shown absolutely no subtlety or diplomatic abilities so far, it is scary to contemplate the coming months and the Iranian situation. The idea of a nuclear Iran is terrifying, yet while America has been content to let European countries make attempts at diplomacy with Iran while staying in the background mumbling threats and then saying, like a true bully, "I never said that..." but now, as it considers taking more drastic steps, it is imperative that there be direct diplomatic contact between the two countries.

Iran's defiance is odd and its stated goal of nuclear energy seems ridiculous in a country that swims in oil, but how long oil? And what of the image of itself standing up to the United States and Israel for the average Iranian to have? On the other hand, offering Iran something dangerous to lose, might make them less callous and less aggressive in pursuing nuclear goals.

I should sleep now, I keep nodding off...the wind has picked up again and it is late, late night.

quickly

2006-04-10T03:40:00.000-04:00

Judas was only following orders it turns out according to a gnostic scripture everybody in the business of finding scrolls has known about for awhile. Borges even creates the idea of Judas as the Savior in his as usual pristene puzzle of a story "Three Versions of Judas". If one has not found Judas's loneliness after his betrayal awful to contemplate, the tree branch snapped over the abyss, if one has not found compassion for that lost soul, then what of Christ do they understand?

A note had survived hinting at whole worlds of intrigue and drama, left by a known heresy hunter, a priest determined to root out the gnostic heresy of this holy Judas, and that to me is the most exciting part of the whole story. What anger of belief, what councils were held under the dark skies of early first milennial Europe, Asia and Africa as the basis of Christian belief was hammered out in arguments of ephemera, arguments in the end that meant everything because they elucidated the hows and whys of belief in their pursuit of the what.

Meanwhile, Scooter only followed orders and it looks like in the non-plussed surprise of the century, Bush himself was helping to orchestrate the leak of information justifying his attack of Iraq back in 2003 all the while hiding information that might cast doubt on the wisdom of attack in Iraq. It's starting to take shape that proving illegality will be difficult, however, the ethics are, at best, beelzebubbian...and if I recall, Beelzebub's chief sins were pride and gluttony. In the end everybody finds the dots they're supposed to be so everything can connect. What sense is there to be found in this?

Scooter's here, George is there, Rummy over there and in the middle like a big fat fly or a glutted heart is Dick himself, the webs should be prison bars but if you wear a suit, start a war and proclaim democracy you got a good chance of getting off with only a little bit of disgrace, and even Nixon eventually wiped that off like it was lint. Harder to wipe off a head wound or a severed tendon. We're hitting 2400 dead in Iraq, Afghanistan has beauty schools in Kabul and the Taliban everywhere else and meanwhile, it turns out it might all be preliminary to Iran.

On the Sunday before the Friday He was to be crucified, Christ entered Jerusalem to the awe and amazement of His people who waved palms to welcome Him and His apostles. This is the only image that could have led Dick Cheney to think of roses and welcomes from the crowds of Iraqis he imagined watching as the saints came marching in. That's their Christianity, tiresomely literal, full of anger and the justifications of their desires and beliefs which are firmly temporal.

For Christians it's Holy Week, but for the Bush Administration, it's another week that promises lies and the culminations of lies, unfortunately, too many of those culminations will be the random lacerations of violence. That's why Scooter matters. Sadly, that's the only reason a weasel like him ever does.

about to sleep...

2006-04-04T02:18:00.000-04:00

Just now I started thinking about "the future", so that was it: I'm awake and so much for sleeping. Rain against the building, sudden thought of childhood and on into insomnia.

I wonder how the Pizzas' show went. Dreazy was a little nervous about choice of footwear, but with this rain, let's face it: whatever gets you through the night is best.

Or I could be wrong. to think about it in practical terms: Goofus doesn't care at all what he wears to the wedding. ("Ah, I like these tennis shoes they can go on and smell me!") Gallant wears the right shoes to every occasion. ("With these blue Chucks on, all the indie kids will think I'm cool!")

In my mind I'm always beating myself up for this one time I was with my friend the Beej and my Uncle Mac. We were going to a railway museum in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the early spring of my 8th grade. Soon would be high school and adult responsibilities like horrible part time jobs that were either 1 to 9 on Saturdays or all Friday night. I'd found this hat with a big fluffy bear-face on its front. I wanted to wear it.

The Beej was in a nice polo and Uncle Mac was out of a 1954 Macy's catalogue as usual. Railroads were a big deal to my uncle and he had bought me some tremendous books, the best one was about train wrecks in the 19th Century, fully illustrated. "Someone's gotta be the personality in this group" I mumbled when my Uncle Mac told me I looked retarded and he was not taking out a child dressed apparently for a sad parade or the end of youth. When your closest friend is embarrassed to catch your eye, you know you've fucked up, but what shames me still is that sense of righteousness and oppression when I went to take that hat off. Only after, of course, a listless argument on my part and a quite spirited one by my uncle defending his right not to be judged by others on my account. In his argument were aphorisms, in mine, the choked illogic of the provincial.

My uncle, because his heart is kind and he is good, was especially attentive to me as we wandered the grounds looking at the retired engines and passenger cars that had once carried the long-dead and the now-retired to their jobs. He knew all the stories, what lines these rode, what cities those had been in. He knew about the people that had taken them all and imagined their lives out loud. He had a gift for cutting to the quick of a sullen teen and getting us to respond to something outside of ourselves. He was always helping out somebody or other while hardly realizing it. When I was younger he told me how mortar rounds sounded, he called Reagan a fool and talked about the failure of communism with genuine regret.

So that's the bear-hat story anyway.

Goofus and Gallant

a bear hat similar to mine

a train wreck

watching baseball

2006-04-03T23:57:00.000-04:00

Today I stayed home and watched baseball. I thought it would be restful. The game itself a promise of summer and ease, of warm breezes and the langorous afternoons drifting through the middle innings of meaningless games. The sudden shock of a homerun, the slow work of a shutout: hammer curves and fastballs that catch the corner. Baseball: a hint of the golden sun in the midst of this sun of chalk. Following is a little on-line diary of watching the game:

1:22 p.m.
Paul LoDuca's batting. How I hate this overrated bastard. Zimmerman just threw him out on a weak grounder.

I have to watch the Mets, ESPN's blacked out. Listening to Keith Hernandez and some schmoo isn't as bad as the Yankee morons -- there really is nothing worse though. Anyway, I can't get into New York sports teams, maybe the Jets a little.

Beltran continued his descent into the upper reaches of mediocrity: he popped out to first in foul ground. Actually, that sucks.

1:31
Zimmerman, batting 5th, has Royce Clayton batting behind him. He still managed a walk. It must be Glavine, Soriano walked just ahead of Zimmerman. Being protected by Royce Clayton is like having Barney Fife as your bodyguard...or it's like being Bob Dylan and opening for Tiny Tim.

1:34
Clayton just struck out.

1:35
The schmoo just called Brian Schneider "perhaps the most underrated player in the league". This about Schneider from rototimes:
Brian Schneider and the Nationals agreed to a four-year deal Tuesday worth $16 million, according to the AP. "Brian is one of the best defensive catchers in baseball and we're glad to be able to keep him in Washington for at least the next four years," general manager Jim Bowden said. "It is the goal of any organization to sign, develop and then retain their own homegrown players, and this is what we've accomplished with Brian's contract." Schneider hit .268 with 10 homers and 44 RBI in 369 at-bats in 2005.

Schneider just grounded out to the catcher.

1:41
Livian Hernandez just threw the ol' fuck you curveball to strike out Carlos Delgado.

1:55
Ryne Sandberg just doubled off of Gooden. Yep, rain delay.

2:18
The Cubs are winning 1-0, but try finding them on television -- besides the 1988 team, Chico Walker was leading off in that game. Ah, New York, I hate you.

2:43
The Cubs are up 5-1 and I'm watching LoDuca do his usual impression of grit which is going to last the papers the whole year. Meanwhile, I don't give a fuck, he's just not that good.

2:57
Livian's beginning to hang his curves.

2:59
David Wright just homered. Really.

3:00
Tony Womack just doubled off of Zambrano in the Cubs game. Well, he's not as bad as Jose Macias after all. Still, it's kind of a slap in the face to competence.

3:42
Soriano thrown out at the plate with no outs on a double by Johnson. Catcher dropped the ball...but the stupidity of that move by the 3rd base coach almost begs the call. How come I have to teach and this moron collects thousands sitting around the third base box sucking. Horrible. Now the tying run at third and two outs. Way to go idiot. Flushed that down the toilet like a Labor Day goldfish on Thanksgiving.

5:44
Some entries got erased...but really, you didn't miss much. Mostly a long rant about something.

5:46
I'm pretty annoyed by ESPN's coverage of opening day. I think next year I'm just going to let opening day "happen". I'm watching some boring baseball.

5:48
Man...It's almost time to the showers for me. One of the idiots just said about a player: "he is just a professional hitter". Yep. He's said that a lot already.

5:50
Will Ohman pitched 1/3 an inning and got the win against the Reds today. In a 16-7 game that's as good as any. Meanwhile, tomorrow it's back to teaching and thinking about immigration and etc. If they call anybody "a professional hitter" ever again I'm going to start screaming and never stop.

5:57
Yep. It's about time to go and leave.

***
So that was it. Opening day. It sucked but I don't care. The game needs its weight, the numbers to start giving us the skeleton of the season, it takes time. The players are still a little rough around the edges and ESPN sucked in terms of giving us some choice in our games as well and most importantly.

Anyway, last night I took the 4/5/6 back to Brooklyn from Harlem, I was reading this book Cloud Atlas. It was so good, even though I was on the local when we hit Union Square I couldn't believe it. The doors opened and I looked up and then had to sprint for the doors a couple seconds later when it all came together for me. It was late at night at that point, only a few people on the train. On that train, me and those few people and me with my book, it felt more like night than it had felt like in a long time, there in the tunnel where it could have been noon or midnight you could tell that it was two in the morning.

the little burro chase game

2006-03-31T01:13:00.000-05:00

So I saw Juan Pablo today and he promised he hadn't stolen his job from a real American like O'Hannigan, Smith or Scherzbach in at least a week. The nativist lunacy that burrows like a cicadda is back again visiting another plague on the manipulated, short-sighted and deluded American people and has brought forth its populist political leeches who make a practice of making policies of hate sound like "messages of the people". They would never presume to rule by ignoring the voice of the people! They must heed it! That great and terrible voice! The one that during the commercials for American Idol and Pimp My Ride has cried out for justice against the oppressive terrorist dishwasher who everywhere seeks to block advancement for the white people of this country...I mean, excuse me, not the white people. Did I say that? No I said the Middle Class. You know, the backbone of this country. Meanwhile these same leeches have no compunction about allowing banks to raise huge fees on the consumers, avoid meaningful discussion of social security and its benefits nor address the huge inequalities that exist in public education. How exactly is New Orleans doing these days again?

Iraq?

Better to legislate by responding to the will of the people than by addressing nagging issues that the liberal press makes too much of.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher believes hell, let the prisoners pick the fruit. That's what the American people want. This is the same Dana Rohrbach of Orange County, California, you know the guy that let Jack Abramoff use his name as a personal reference when he was getting a $60 million loan for some casino boats in Florida.

Old Dana, he really worries what the people of America want. And they want rapists and people who wave the Mexican flag at rallies picking fruit in the noonday sun.

Surely it was what Americans wanted when Rep. Rohrabacher helped out a guy who promised to make a movie based on a Rohrabacher script. Rohrabacher set up some meetings with some Republicans serving on the committee liasoning with the Department of Homeland Security and the guy offered to make one pro-American movie a year and generally be a good citizen. He'd make a good American movie that any mom, pop and their tyke could watch without having to worry about the homosexuals, the deviants or the liberals funding it and influencing it. And if that filmmaker happened to rip off his investors of five or six million bucks, well, look, he said he was going to make pro-American movies. You don't see Steven Speilberg doing that.

Rohrabacher was also the guy that wrote California's legendary prop. 187 and in 2004 proposed a bill to withhold emergency room treatment to people who couldn't prove they were citizens of our fair country.

Apparently Americans are an angry, vengeful lot. At least the ones he represents. And why not, the forces of hate are strong in this world -- as a matter of fact he supported the Taliban as enemies of terrorism and hate in 1996. They would bring order he asserted in the November/December 1996 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. After 9/11 he said the attacks were because the Clinton administration was blind.

And even though Rohrabacher's political campaigns have been largely funded by a friendly billionaire, and though he's friends with "an honest man", the person he was referring to there being of course, Jack Abramoff, Rep. Rohrabacher really is concerned with representing the views of Mr. and Mrs. Joe America.

And if America is a vengeful, vindictive, xenophopic place right now, who is Rep. Rohrabacher to blow against the wind? Hell, he's turning on the fan and opening the windows so the voice of true Americans (not ones waving some spic flag) can ring out. "Blow wind blow," he breathes to himself and to everybody that will listen.

Give me that spic flag, that Mexican flag to be correct and I'll wave it in your face too (and I'm no nationalist, the country is about as valid as the sports team -- at best it's a way of quantifying who needs to be helped and amassing ways to organize the morpheus and bring assistance to those who need it, meanwhile the Cubs are a way of life), and I think of all the people I know who came here, some risking things to call this country their home that few would be willing to do who were born here, and these people who have been so good to me so many times, some of their kids I've tutored, I've taught now, and who made my life as a waiter, a teacher, a friend, so much fucking fun I didn't worry about when I was leaving, what I was doing or how I looked, who work as hard as any other person and who don't have to apologize for anything, and I see some bastard like this, spitting on these people with his flag-spitted lips, saying the Mexicans are the ones tearing this country down and meanwhile, him and all the other opportunist low-lifes like him who have brought down the level of political and social discourse in this country to the neanderthal level acting like they're protecting us and have our best interests at heart when they are leeching off of us and seeking to instill the fear necessary to manipulate and the hate necessary to manipulate. When is the point that to call an ass an ass is more than honest, it's necessary?

How does he come to represent the views of so many of our citizens? This is a sick, sick country, with a middle class so jittery and uncertain of its economic and social future that since we laid that atom bomb over the small river jutting through Hiroshima it has been easier and easier to co-opt the middle class in a brutal, arrogant and expensive foreign policy. To gather their support has only taken the breath of a potential threat to their way of life, fragile as it is because it is built on the broken eggshells of a foreign policy that has supported far more tyrants than it has fought, and has involved a blossoming of slave labor and a need for willful blindness as the complicity of the many.

And now it's the Mexicans fault. Whatever that means.

That keeps the Arabs off the front page because things aren't too cool on that front right now, but it reminds all those voters just who they need to keep in mind for protection. Because it's a mean world out there. And I don't want to say anything, but you know that Mexican clipping your hedges, he could have helped some Al Qu'aida guy get in here. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? How about three degrees of Osama bin Laden? You, that hedger, Osama.

How about measures to help the lives of the people who help build the fabric of our society? Not just the illegal immigrant, but those people not pandered to by the commercials during Desperate Housewives?

This battle, for the meaning of government, at worst this political opportunism will cost yet more lives. The political alter of sacrifice is hungry these days. A couple more American soldiers were killed in Iraq today.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, I'm sure, is quite comfortable at the moment.

Many of those he seeks to further punish, are toiling away at jobs that only further define the oppressive gap between the comfortable and jittery constituancy of Dana Rohrabacher and the struggling and growing population of those who shoulder this economy on their backs. Many of those he claims to support, he's sent on a fool's errand, and they are at this moment, some of them, patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods already spilling over and veering toward civil war.

Meanwhile, Wood is out until May and Prior's at least a few weeks away. As dreary as that thought is, it's the one that keeps me sane. That and that Zambrano still throws. The vines aren't there yet at Wrigley, won't be until mid-May at the earliest, but next week there's baseball, the beautiful beginning, middle and end broken up into threes.

"no president wants war"

2006-03-23T04:13:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah?

Why is it today I miss Los Angeles? Who misses Los Angeles besides people from Los Angeles? The 405? Cold Water Canyon? The 110 on both ends, the ocean and the hills just beyond Pasadena that lead out through the hills into the long flat bowl of central California that bakes and hides as you approach it from the north in a fog.

I used to love driving down the Five, the fault just off the highway running along and watching the horizon for signs of police aircraft. It's its own world there, a language of 1950s truckers and washed out women who've long ago lost hope of making it out unless it's as inspiration for a sleazy character in a cheap detective novel and I'm between San Francisco and Los Angeles for just a minute and always thinking I should stop and see what downtown Bakersfield looks like.

Then Los Angeles, coming in over the pass where the temperature drops and it first it seems like it's still aways away but then the 110 and soon enough the 101 and at night the 101 can feel like the most perfect place on earth.

Going home I'd always take the 101 and look forward to the ocean just around Santa Barbara and, if I was lucky, the last bit of sunlight in the hills just off San Luis Obispo. Here, Brooklyn's stuck in this perpetual pre-spring/post-winter rut where the wind (there is no breeze) is always cold and the sun still feels weak. Baseball in less than a month?

I can't talk about the idiot in the White House today, but I did learn that a soldier in Iraq is about 30 times more likely to die than if he were at home. I don't know about catastrophic injuries, but I do know some conservative pundits have been trying to say Iraq's not much more dangerous than anywhere else. Really (one place to look is littlegreenfootballs.com on 3/21). They don't want to denigrate the soldiers, they say, but really, hell, construction's just as dangerous. College is just as dangerous. Accounting. Yep. So they imply. As much as I hated French, I will never confuse it with Falujah.

So anyway, some guy at tpmcafe.com ran some statistics, which didn't take into account things like soldiers probably don't have aggravating conditions that would more directly threaten their lives than would be found in the rest of the population, which might make it even more dangerous, from a statistical point of view. I stayed home sick today.

Mostly I read, slept and listened to those old songs I've been downloading. I also made a final desperate look for my shaver, but it's gone. Gone, gone, gone. So I'll have to buy a new one tomorrow or the next day and get respectable again. Seriously, it looks more likely than not, on looking at me, that I'll ask you for change.

I spent a bunch of time at my friend Melissa's website. She runs a magazine which is beautifully put together, called Hyphen ( www.hyphenmagazine.com ), it makes me wonder why I'm wasting my life: supreme efforts like that.

I also listened to "Rosa Parks" by Outkast a bunch of times and thought about this article I read a few days ago where some guy who robbed Rosa Parks's apartment and beat her in the 1990s was really sorry because he'd never get to apologize to her. He said he was upset that he would go down in history as the guy who robbed Rosa Parks and he wants redemption. He supposes he will have to draw strength from God. He got 53 dollars. Apparently he had a history of targeting older women for robbery and when he got jumped the next day and turned over to the police he had 11 cents. ( http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060319/METRO/603190401/-1/ARCHIVE ) So he gets to jail and everybody takes delight in beating the hell out of him and throwing shit on him and basically passing judgment because finally here's somebody who sucks more than them and there's so much of this everywhere, this, "I would never do THAT" and yesterday O'Reilly's talking to Newt Gingrich about how great Bush was for realizing he "had to take his cause directly to the American people" because of course the media is confusing them, and then O'Reilly turned to the camera, and I was already sick and getting sicker in a haze of pseudafed and he tells me I won't want to miss his next segment, an interview with a kid who had been sexually abused by a guy who only got probation. There it is: groundbreaking journalism. A lot of reporting and deciding there and what else are you supposed to decide about some sexual predator and yet, I thought about it after I turned the channel, because I didn't really want to have to deal with the syruppy sympathy and sloppy sentamental outrage against such an easy target, so I watched this movie for a few minutes with Rosalind Russel on Turner Classics that looked wonderful but I needed to sleep but I kept thinking about it as I said above, while I was dropping off into this really odd dream: why is it that if you try to understand something awful like those above things in a larger context in which we all take on some responsibility (you know, "am I not my brother's keeper" and stuff like that), you're immediately jumped on and instead of being able to explore these issues and their connectivities in discussion you constantly are reduced to saying things like "I understand how horrible and heinous this was", well duh, but can we at least explore the idea that we have a violently repressed society sexually in which we inject tons of artificial sexual stimulants that create images that don't challenge the viewer's fantasies but instead coddle them and further them (and further more, this is a necessary complication of free speech) and while pedophilia is nothing new, how do we spend so much time thinking about that in the media with such obvious outrage and titillation while ignoring our societal confusion as to sex that exists; or that we have a huge underclass that is largely ignored except for when we condemn it and its people of sin and that in such a society it's just a matter of time before someone of Rosa Parks stature is robbed by somebody of Joseph Skipper's stature and it's just their respective bad luck that it's those two, with those names, who become linked so that the one simply becomes a sentence in the other's book of life.

I hate all this God stuff, how we ascribe to God these human attributes like strength and will so that we can give shape to things like fate and life. Let God be God, thank God for existance and then don't profance God with all our sillinesses, stupidities and good lucks. We create borders in which we can define God: constellations against the vacuum of space. I won't hold God to any word, the words were for us to use, for us to guess with, who knows why? But the vastness of this Creation forces us to create all these words which in the end form our only relationship to Creation that is entirely socially based. And so often calling on the "word" of God is used as a way to silence dissent (hardly a groundbreaking thought, I know), but why is the authority of knowing SO EASILY assumed by so many people? How do you presume to KNOW the will of God. The will of God? The will of God is the story of the birth of something out of nothing, can you presume to know that? If your knowledge of God is only selective then how do you discern where your belief becomes a certainty.

To call on faith at this point is to simply revert to the argument "I know because I know". That's ok if you're talking about who's the best baseball player ever, or which cheese is better than which, but not ok if you're talking about how people should be required to live.

I should sleep, tomorrow is long.