My good friend Tom Head has posted a history of racial profiling in the United States in the wake of the unwarranted arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Unfortunately, my good friend misses the point. Profiling is not the same as enslaving or discriminating against a group; it is assigning moral traits to certain shared physical characteristics.
A history of profiling might thus start not with emperor Charles V of Spain and Germany, whose mandates never held sway in the United States, as Tom's historical sketch suggests, but perhaps with the curse of Ham. The biblical story (Gen. 9:20-27) goes that Ham had "seen the nakedness" (which scholars read as a euphemism for sodomy) of his father, Noah, causing the latter to exclaim: "Cursed be Canaan [Ham's son]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."
How the descendants of Ham came to be identified with Africans is a twisted marriage of, on the one hand, prejudice convenient to English elites who in the 17th century saw profits in the slave trade, and on the other, murky Protestant readings of a text that in itself has no racial or ethnic content, tacit or explicit.
Note the two elements and their order.
First, there arose the economic need for slaves in the English colonies, as improved economic conditions in Britain diminished the supply of white indentured servants and a shift to the African slave trade as a source of labor.
Only in a second instance, after commercial and legal changes had institutionalized the trade, did the profile arise. The slaver would have told himself that "These Africans do not wear European clothes nor speak a European language, therefore they are savage, lesser beings fit only to serve whites."
The colonials whose society began to depend on the slavers' human cargo then needed to assuage their consciences in the face of the "peculiar institution." Wielding their Bibles, they seized on the Africans' dark skin, reasoning that it was a sign that their souls were "blackened" with Ham's sin and they were condemned to be the lowest caste of servants.
Thus was born the first American ethnic profile.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Walter Cronkite was a bore
Since when are people who read news on television deserving of posthumous panegyrics befitting a Nobel Prize winner? What did Cronkite do, other than deliver in the same flat bass the most trivial, intellectually deadened factoids, such as the alleged precise time President Kennedy died?
A trained monkey could have done better.
One of the reasons television is one of the worst sources of information is precisely because of individuals such as Cronkite, who devoted his life to perpetuating the stultifying deception that they were delivering news, when all they were doing was reading headlines.
It's the broadcast pretense of seriousness, conveyed merely through a particular ton of voice, that allowed millions to be deceived into voting, against their own best interests, for people who sounded and looked as smooth as Cronkite. It was Cronkite who taught Americans that TV form outweighs substance: how else could Ronald Reagan, a man who at best play acted the roles of governor and president, ever have been elected?
Reading is today a kindergarten skill. Reading clearly and audibly can be learned by the end of elementary school. A male bass voice develops in junior high school without any particular training. So, where's the achievement of using these abilities in front of a camera?
A trained monkey could have done better.
One of the reasons television is one of the worst sources of information is precisely because of individuals such as Cronkite, who devoted his life to perpetuating the stultifying deception that they were delivering news, when all they were doing was reading headlines.
It's the broadcast pretense of seriousness, conveyed merely through a particular ton of voice, that allowed millions to be deceived into voting, against their own best interests, for people who sounded and looked as smooth as Cronkite. It was Cronkite who taught Americans that TV form outweighs substance: how else could Ronald Reagan, a man who at best play acted the roles of governor and president, ever have been elected?
Reading is today a kindergarten skill. Reading clearly and audibly can be learned by the end of elementary school. A male bass voice develops in junior high school without any particular training. So, where's the achievement of using these abilities in front of a camera?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Awake to Glory, Children of France!
With the words of the title, today we remember the signature event of their revolution, the storming of a prison fortress 220 years ago. Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! So what is a revolution and how can we tell one has occurred?
Two centuries ago, France was organized politically, economically and socially as the private estate of a very small hereditary elite. In that France lived the fattened clergy that blessed all the king did, the merchants and bankers who greased the wheels of the nobility's carriages, the courtiers and courtesans who tried to eke a living on the leavings of the privileged few and the very, very many who were the hereditary human beasts of burden.
Today the nobility is largely gone. The merchants and bankers have supplanted them. But the very many have unions and public schools and vacations and cars. Today only 6.2 percent of the French population lives under their official poverty threshold, which is higher than that of the United States.
Less than a century ago, Russia was a vast plantation in the hands of the Romanov family and their favorites. Not counting the papacy, which was not a nation-state at the time, in 1917 the czarist regime was the last remaining absolute monarchy of Europe.
Imperial Russia's elected legislative body, the Duma, was merely an advisory body with little effective power except to complain; from 1907 on, the leftist parties, which had won significant pluralities in the first two elections elections, were almost completely suppressed as electoral law was changed to favor propertied, land-holding voters. The nation was still not industrialized and its agriculture was primitive and in the hands of newly liberated serfs who had effectively become, as in the American South, penniless sharecroppers. The educated middle class was miniscule.
Today, with all its troubles, Russia's income inequality is lower than that of the United States -- the Russian Gini coefficient index stood at 40 in 2005, compared to 46.9 in the USA, albeit both higher than for most European Union member states.
In 1776, what is today the United States was divided into a vast territory held by native tribes and secondarily a set of European colonies comprising a string of small seaboard settlements held (in order of size) by Spain, France and England. In the English colony, a relatively small elite of freeholders and wealthy merchants decided not to pay taxes used to finance their defense from neighbors tired of their predatory behavior.
Their revolt was led by a few high-minded slaveowners and by merchants and bankers who proceeded to make enormous war profits by lending and supplying materiel to the fledgling government. In the new nation's eventual compact, proclamations of freedom did not apply to natives, African slaves nor indentured English servants, who were not even counted as full human beings for the purposes of electoral apportionment. In a process of roughly two centuries, still unfinished, each one had to shed blood to gain a semblance of fairness.
Today, 12.5 percent of all U.S. inhabitants -- or about 36 million people -- live below the poverty threshhold ($10,830 for an individual; $22,050 for a family of four). That's double the proportion in France, living at a lower threshold.
"In the French Revolution, when laborers' wives were mud-splattered by a passing carriage, they yelled at the marquise studiously ignoring them in her cabin, saying "One day we will all be marquises,' " a literature professor once remarked, adding, "while in the Russian Revolution they cried, 'One day you will be a peasant just like us.' "
We in the United States like to think our people are historically like the French. But that is not quite true.
On the American carriage rode a slaveowner who called out to the rabble, "Go die for me so I can avoid paying British taxes, go till my land and work my factories and build roads for my goods, go work, work work, and God will make you rich like me!"
And as the fools followed their pied piper, the gentleman's gales of laughter were drowned out by the cobblestone clopping of his hastening horses.
Two centuries ago, France was organized politically, economically and socially as the private estate of a very small hereditary elite. In that France lived the fattened clergy that blessed all the king did, the merchants and bankers who greased the wheels of the nobility's carriages, the courtiers and courtesans who tried to eke a living on the leavings of the privileged few and the very, very many who were the hereditary human beasts of burden.Today the nobility is largely gone. The merchants and bankers have supplanted them. But the very many have unions and public schools and vacations and cars. Today only 6.2 percent of the French population lives under their official poverty threshold, which is higher than that of the United States.
Less than a century ago, Russia was a vast plantation in the hands of the Romanov family and their favorites. Not counting the papacy, which was not a nation-state at the time, in 1917 the czarist regime was the last remaining absolute monarchy of Europe.
Imperial Russia's elected legislative body, the Duma, was merely an advisory body with little effective power except to complain; from 1907 on, the leftist parties, which had won significant pluralities in the first two elections elections, were almost completely suppressed as electoral law was changed to favor propertied, land-holding voters. The nation was still not industrialized and its agriculture was primitive and in the hands of newly liberated serfs who had effectively become, as in the American South, penniless sharecroppers. The educated middle class was miniscule.
Today, with all its troubles, Russia's income inequality is lower than that of the United States -- the Russian Gini coefficient index stood at 40 in 2005, compared to 46.9 in the USA, albeit both higher than for most European Union member states.
In 1776, what is today the United States was divided into a vast territory held by native tribes and secondarily a set of European colonies comprising a string of small seaboard settlements held (in order of size) by Spain, France and England. In the English colony, a relatively small elite of freeholders and wealthy merchants decided not to pay taxes used to finance their defense from neighbors tired of their predatory behavior.
Their revolt was led by a few high-minded slaveowners and by merchants and bankers who proceeded to make enormous war profits by lending and supplying materiel to the fledgling government. In the new nation's eventual compact, proclamations of freedom did not apply to natives, African slaves nor indentured English servants, who were not even counted as full human beings for the purposes of electoral apportionment. In a process of roughly two centuries, still unfinished, each one had to shed blood to gain a semblance of fairness.
Today, 12.5 percent of all U.S. inhabitants -- or about 36 million people -- live below the poverty threshhold ($10,830 for an individual; $22,050 for a family of four). That's double the proportion in France, living at a lower threshold.
"In the French Revolution, when laborers' wives were mud-splattered by a passing carriage, they yelled at the marquise studiously ignoring them in her cabin, saying "One day we will all be marquises,' " a literature professor once remarked, adding, "while in the Russian Revolution they cried, 'One day you will be a peasant just like us.' "
We in the United States like to think our people are historically like the French. But that is not quite true.
On the American carriage rode a slaveowner who called out to the rabble, "Go die for me so I can avoid paying British taxes, go till my land and work my factories and build roads for my goods, go work, work work, and God will make you rich like me!"
And as the fools followed their pied piper, the gentleman's gales of laughter were drowned out by the cobblestone clopping of his hastening horses.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
The Freedom Delusion
Today is Argentina's Independence Day. On July 9, 1816, delegates from the United Provinces of the South, voted to sever political ties with the Spanish monarch. It's an odd holiday because the event was almost an afterthought: the revolt against Spanish rule began on May 25, 1810, all of which reminds me, even more oddly, of a story about Ghana's independence.
First, a little context.
For six long years Gen. José de San Martín kept demanding that the congress of provincial delegates -- similar to the U.S. Continental Congress -- declare a rupture. In 1810, news had arrived of Napoleon having marched into Spain and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII. The locals, lacking an army, deposed the viceroy and seized power in name of the imprisoned monarch.
This was a legal technicality, built on the colonial legal technicality that the territories in the American continent belonged not to Spain, but to the Spanish crown, technically equal in sovereignty to Spain. (I believe Britain held to a similar conceit as a way to deprive its colonies of a seat in Parliament.)
By 1816, with Napoleon long gone, San Martín was growing tired of the charade of claiming allegiance to the same monarch as the Spanish troops with whom he did battle.
Independence and freedom were never the same thing, as the slaves of all the colonies well knew.
Indeed, the notion was put most succinctly by a classmate of mine -- Monica G. -- in a university short story seminar in Montreal. She had written a short story set in her native Ghana. (Imagine how hard it must have been for a citizen of an African country so near the Equator to weather the blizzards of Canada!)
The protagonist was a poor old woman going home from work as a domestic on the eve of Ghana's independence. I forget what happened in the story, but I recall one of the woman's hopes for the great event of which everybody talked.
Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.
We have all shared in the disappointment of realizing that the realization of our highest, fondest and noblest hopes never quite turns out as we imagined, if it ever does. Our ideals, like our lives, turn to dust, like the soil of Ghana's deforested savannah.
First, a little context.
For six long years Gen. José de San Martín kept demanding that the congress of provincial delegates -- similar to the U.S. Continental Congress -- declare a rupture. In 1810, news had arrived of Napoleon having marched into Spain and imprisoned King Ferdinand VII. The locals, lacking an army, deposed the viceroy and seized power in name of the imprisoned monarch.
This was a legal technicality, built on the colonial legal technicality that the territories in the American continent belonged not to Spain, but to the Spanish crown, technically equal in sovereignty to Spain. (I believe Britain held to a similar conceit as a way to deprive its colonies of a seat in Parliament.)
By 1816, with Napoleon long gone, San Martín was growing tired of the charade of claiming allegiance to the same monarch as the Spanish troops with whom he did battle.
Independence and freedom were never the same thing, as the slaves of all the colonies well knew.
Indeed, the notion was put most succinctly by a classmate of mine -- Monica G. -- in a university short story seminar in Montreal. She had written a short story set in her native Ghana. (Imagine how hard it must have been for a citizen of an African country so near the Equator to weather the blizzards of Canada!)
The protagonist was a poor old woman going home from work as a domestic on the eve of Ghana's independence. I forget what happened in the story, but I recall one of the woman's hopes for the great event of which everybody talked.
Would the bus be free after independence, she wondered.
We have all shared in the disappointment of realizing that the realization of our highest, fondest and noblest hopes never quite turns out as we imagined, if it ever does. Our ideals, like our lives, turn to dust, like the soil of Ghana's deforested savannah.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Why do the heathen rage?
Taking a leaf from Chani's Sacred Life Sunday series, our text this morning is Psalm 2:1. In the words of the King James translation, it runs "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?"
There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.
Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.
O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:
Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.
Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.
To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.
We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.
The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:
Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.
Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?
How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?
Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.
Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following
It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.
There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.
That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.
There used to be a religious advertisement in The Washington Post that contained a small "column" sermonette by some Protestant evangelical that was perennially headlined Why Do the Heathen Rage? Even when I believed in Christianity I could never get very far before the sheer kookiness of the writer overwhelmed me. The author was a Southern preacher right out of Flannery O'Connor.
Turns out that among O'Connor's papers was found a draft novel 378 pages long, titled precisely “Why Do the Heathen Rage.” It is clearly an unfinished work that reveals O'Connor's literary mind in its 17 -- count 'em -- versions of a single porch scene.
O'Connor, like me, was a Catholic; like me she was intrigued by Protestant preaching, particularly the rambling low-church evangelical genre predominant in the South where she lived. To her the idiom must have been familiar; I still need subtitles for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
All the above goes to say that this question is resonant to most of humanity that I have come across. Let's hear the Psalmist once again:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."The thought came to me when Dubya could come to power unelected, order wiretapping on Americans, out his own country's intelligence officer and imprison people indefinitely without trial, all in defiance of his oath of office to the Constitution ... all with utter impunity.
Pace, Republicans! I imagine a similar outrage must have struck GOPers when Bill Clinton managed to accede to the male Holy Grail of oral sex at the office, without the tablets of family values parting a Red Sea of blood from his body. Not only that! His enemies were forced to resign. Among them, you will recall, one Newton Leroy Gingrich was found cavorting with a church choir singer while his wife lay dying of cancer.
Not all of us, however, take part in hijinks in the Oval Office or under the Capitol's dome.
To most of us the "heathens" (the Douay translation says "Gentiles") are ordinary folk, such as the lazy but imperious boss who gets acclaim for one's work, the colleague who gets raises undeservedly, the myriad of salespeople who sell us defective products under deceptive terms, the lover who cheats on us and yet "wins" the approval or envy of peers. And so on.
We do everything right, we tell ourselves, yet the other guy (it's usually a guy) overtakes us from the slow lane.
The Bible's solution doesn't quite do it, either. Take Psalm 2:4-6:
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.The Psalms have this thing with a king who will reign forever and "smite" anyone who even looked at us the wrong way. So? I want my smiting done right now!
Actually, to me, quite apart from Christianity or faith or dogma or anything of that sort, the question means something entirely different, something quite fitting now that I am an avowed apostate.
Why do I, the heathen, rage? Why did I, the heathen in believer's clothes, rage when I laughed at the author of Why Do the Heathen Rage?
How dare I rage at Dubya, when I defied the oaths I have taken?
Here the Bible, an anthology of certainly valuable writings that, at a minimum, display a whole history of thought and emotions and lives and human experiences, does come in handy.
Unzipper thy Olde Bibles and open to Isaiah 37:28-29 and read (a little out of context because I am not interested in the possible grand Christological issues underlying the passage) the following
But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and thy rage against me.This reminds me of a T-shirt I bought one summer at Rehoboth Beach. On a black background it features a silver skull engulfed in golden flames. Over the years I came to call this image the picture of my inner, raging daemon.
Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into mine ears ...
It was my Oedipal daemon, the sprite of wounded professional pride in the face of failure or shortcoming, the fury of furies set loose on those I thought mocked my efforts or set arms against them and the final Götterdämmerung at the summit, when all is left but the descent to Hades.
There was an inner dialogue similar to that Isaiah sets up between God and the heathens. The divine voice in me knew perfectly well the rages of the demonic voice. I was a demigod, willing my own defeat as I ordered the Earth scorched to cinders.
That was all before I became a man, realizing that, heathen though I may be, I do no longer rage, for it serves no purpose for what little life remains. Perhaps that is why we all ask this question so insistently.
Friday, July 03, 2009
The Former Permanent Majority Party
Paul Krugman is a better mortal than I am -- he even has a major platform, an actual specialty and Nobel Prize in his field -- so he may be willing to resist wasting "precious column inches on the former Permanent Majority Party." However, he does have this world-famous blog to feed.
As I did with neoconservatism, I would like to explain why the recurrent Republican zipper, hate-radio and other problems should not be all that surprising. After all, it's not like at any time after Abraham Lincoln the Republicans ever stood for anything noble capable of evoking self-sacrifice.
It is true that some GIs were uneducated enough to have written in 2003 to relatives that they were happy to be fighting in Iraq so their families could pay lower prices at the gas pump. However, "I died so you could save 10 cents at the pump" falls somewhat flat as a line for a stirring patriotic anthem. Never mind that prices never got that low anyway.
Nor will we find too many dreamy eyed policy visionaries desirous to devote their lifetime to government service to ensure that the richest 2 percent pay no taxes.
As for the party's traditions, until Richard Nixon, the Grant's Administration held the record for most corrupt and until the latest President Bush, the Hoover Administration took the gold medal for most blasé in the face of economic crisis.
Besides, what was the pool of potential "cadres" for the Reagan "revolution" other than folks whose fondest dreams was cooking up some highly leveraged financial derivative that would make them millionaires -- excuse me, billionaires? I have a very fine bridge in Brooklyn to sell to anyone who would expect loyalty, let alone fidelity to a political platform from such people.
And while we're talking about fidelity, let's now recall the fine "family values" of divorced Ronald Reagan whose children were estranged from him, of Newt Gingrich who served his wife with divorce papers at her cancer deathbed, of Bob Livingston who tried to crucify Bill Clinton for playing with cigars while in his own case a cigar really was not a cigar. And since then Craig and Ensign and Sanford and surely others I'm forgetting.
Did anyone really expect that the piano players at the GOP bordello were going to hang around after the party?
As I did with neoconservatism, I would like to explain why the recurrent Republican zipper, hate-radio and other problems should not be all that surprising. After all, it's not like at any time after Abraham Lincoln the Republicans ever stood for anything noble capable of evoking self-sacrifice.
It is true that some GIs were uneducated enough to have written in 2003 to relatives that they were happy to be fighting in Iraq so their families could pay lower prices at the gas pump. However, "I died so you could save 10 cents at the pump" falls somewhat flat as a line for a stirring patriotic anthem. Never mind that prices never got that low anyway.
Nor will we find too many dreamy eyed policy visionaries desirous to devote their lifetime to government service to ensure that the richest 2 percent pay no taxes.
As for the party's traditions, until Richard Nixon, the Grant's Administration held the record for most corrupt and until the latest President Bush, the Hoover Administration took the gold medal for most blasé in the face of economic crisis.
Besides, what was the pool of potential "cadres" for the Reagan "revolution" other than folks whose fondest dreams was cooking up some highly leveraged financial derivative that would make them millionaires -- excuse me, billionaires? I have a very fine bridge in Brooklyn to sell to anyone who would expect loyalty, let alone fidelity to a political platform from such people.
And while we're talking about fidelity, let's now recall the fine "family values" of divorced Ronald Reagan whose children were estranged from him, of Newt Gingrich who served his wife with divorce papers at her cancer deathbed, of Bob Livingston who tried to crucify Bill Clinton for playing with cigars while in his own case a cigar really was not a cigar. And since then Craig and Ensign and Sanford and surely others I'm forgetting.
Did anyone really expect that the piano players at the GOP bordello were going to hang around after the party?
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Happy Real Independence Day
Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!
Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.
The brief document read:
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.
The brief document read:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:
That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.
The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever moreNow, 233 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.
In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Anti-Chavez Rabies Shows Up in Honduras Mixup
Hither and yon one gets a glimpse on the 'net of people who seem morbidly rabid about anything connected to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. One does not have to carry water to notice it.
He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.
People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.
And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?
He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.
People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.
And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Les Scandales Politiques Américains
In the manner of Art Buchwald's famous column explaining Thanksgiving's Day to the French, which was reprinted every year for decades after its 1953 debut, I would like to explain to readers of Le Monde why Mark Sanford is news in the USA.
Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):
Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)
A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)
Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!
"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.
Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?
Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).
Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!
Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)
Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.
Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.
Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).
Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?
Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.
Here's the QPFD (les questions démandés plus fréquentes -- or frequently asked questions):
Q. Quelle hypocrisie ! Dans un pays avec ce taux de divorce, les affaires extra-conjugales seraient-elles rarissimes ? (No translation needed, just imagine a French man with handlebar mustache and beret dropping his paper on the outdoor café table as his arms raise with indignation demanding vengeance from the heavens.)
A. My dear François, extramarital affairs are not all that uncommon in the USA and the divorce rate is high. The real puzzle, however, is the fact that all surveys (sondages) since Kinsey's have found that men cheat (tromp) more than women, leading me to wonder whether adulterous women take on several lovers to offset the imbalance (déséquilibre). (Hence Sanford's trip to Argentina [la terre du tango] in search of illicit love.)
Q. So they are normal men. But being punished they want a revenge on their fellows, what a nice mentality!
"Normal" in France, as I understand it, involves presidents who must either have suitable number of mistresses (maîtresses) to stay in power or else wives who are incurable man-chasers. Unfortunately, my friend Pierre, that happens only in France.
Q. I wonder whether the notion of lying is always used for sexual stuff, no? The reason or the cause of Clinton's problem has always said to be because he lied (not because he had sex with Monica) which appears to be a wide hypocrisie. Do you have other examples?
Lying (mentir), my adored Fifi, isn't always about sexual things (les choses sexuelles). I'd bet that Clinton subscribed to the school of thought that what Monica did to him and his cigar did to her was not "sex." To him these deeds did not encompass the act that the Founding Fathers (les Péres Fondateurs) had in mind when they referred to "sexual Congreff" (l'Asamblée carnale), where we got the tradition of lobbying (le lobbying).
Q. Why private life has to do with politics? OK the guy had not to boast and to defend about familiy values, right, but we think that if politicans's private life was respected, there will be much less problems.
Jacques, Jacques, Jacques! This is the land of the Scarlet Letter (la Lettre Écarlate). If Republicans didn't make hay (le foin) out of the immorality ascribed to everybody else, on what platform would they ever be elected: balanced budgets? peace and prosperity? fair taxes?
As if!
Q. Et Abe Fortas ... had he to renounce because he lied about his payments. Or was it merely what we call "délit d'initié", when someone has hidden interest ? (Which is not lying.)
Ah, ma belle Louise, you have studied our history well. But here lying about money is still lying. Especially about money (l'argent), which is ten times more important than sex.
Q. I have always been very suprised that apparently all Americans finally accepted Bush lying about the supposed weapons; nothing happened to him as it happened to Clinton. He lied. OK he lied. Too bad. Period. End of the story. That is why I dont really believe that lying is such unforgivable in the USA.
Hmm ... interesting point. Nothing happened to Clinton, either, now that I recall. It was Gingrich and Livingston, the Right Wing nut witch hunters (les chasseurs de sorciéres de l'Aile Droite noix) who had to quit because of their affairs (liaisons condits).
Q. Irangate. That sounds to be a very complicated story, but lying does not seem to be the main fault, was it?
Sorry, but I was out of the loop, Michélle.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Time to Push Back for Health Change
These days it seems the only folks pushing back are the health insurance-pharma-medical mafia, the banks and the auto executives. It's time to push back and show President Obama that those of us on the popular side of the spectrum really do want the change for which we voted.
Indeed, many more of us than public polls reveal would gladly take over the banks, get rid of the insurance companies and put the pharmaceutical and medical industry at the service of society.
Health care, as long as it is available for one, is a human right for all. To be healthy is an essential condition for human dignity. To force someone to live with pain and indignity merely because we are too selfish to share resources is inhumane and cruel.
Yet this is what is proposed by those "moderates" in Congress who are willing to jettison even a very modest "public option" for the sake of "bipartisan" bribery. For the richest country in the world to deny health care to about 50 million of its people, when the next 20 richest countries manage to care for all just fine is inexcusable, wrong and foolhardy.
If I had my druthers, we would have a national health service (see the presentation on H.R. 676, a bill by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.) much as there is in in those benighted, backward isles of Britain and that technologically primitive Germany and those Third World economies of France and Japan. Or our oft-forgotten neighbor, Canada. All of which work. I've lived in Britain and Canada and occasionally received medical care there just fine.
In no other advanced industrialized nation is health an economic burden on the average individual. You can change jobs, get sick, grow old, anything, secure in the knowledge that society will take care of you.
Don't cave in, Democrats. In fact, put a single-payer system on the table.
Indeed, many more of us than public polls reveal would gladly take over the banks, get rid of the insurance companies and put the pharmaceutical and medical industry at the service of society.
Health care, as long as it is available for one, is a human right for all. To be healthy is an essential condition for human dignity. To force someone to live with pain and indignity merely because we are too selfish to share resources is inhumane and cruel.
Yet this is what is proposed by those "moderates" in Congress who are willing to jettison even a very modest "public option" for the sake of "bipartisan" bribery. For the richest country in the world to deny health care to about 50 million of its people, when the next 20 richest countries manage to care for all just fine is inexcusable, wrong and foolhardy.
If I had my druthers, we would have a national health service (see the presentation on H.R. 676, a bill by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.) much as there is in in those benighted, backward isles of Britain and that technologically primitive Germany and those Third World economies of France and Japan. Or our oft-forgotten neighbor, Canada. All of which work. I've lived in Britain and Canada and occasionally received medical care there just fine.
In no other advanced industrialized nation is health an economic burden on the average individual. You can change jobs, get sick, grow old, anything, secure in the knowledge that society will take care of you.
Don't cave in, Democrats. In fact, put a single-payer system on the table.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Why Is Racism Not Over?
Of course, racism didn't end on Jan. 20, 2009. There even was a (currently dormant) blog mocking the idea called, natch, Racism is Over. Yet this past weekend, lunching and dining with fellow educated Americans of European origin whom I would have thought knew better, I was brought face to face with the persistence of racism.
Don't believe it? Here are two instances in one day.
Item one: Lunch. A government lawyer complained to me about the admittedly absurd absence notes from one colleague (e.g., "my cat has a headache") and the administrative assistant who apparently manages to work all day without turning on the computer on her desk. His girlfriend proceeded to generalize about how people of the ethnicity of the two goldbrickers (whisper: "black") tend to be like that.
So I try reason: President Obama is African-American and he seems pretty hard working to me. The reply? "That's the exception."
Then I begin to make a list in my mind of black intellectuals, artists, legal scholars, biblical scholars -- and I stop. It's no use: everything has been prejudged. The only sane response is given by my companion, who insists that these comments are simply wrong.
Item two: Dinner. I express concern for my younger son's exposure to mortal danger given his choice of career (law enforcement) and a fellow diner who is a health care consultant with umpteen degrees blurts out, "Especially in D.C., which has a 70 percent black population." The implication, of course, is that the murder rate has something to do with blacks, because as we all know, whites never kill anyone.
For the second time in one day, I am dumbfounded.
I genuinely liked these people who, admittedly, were recent acquaintances. The lawyer was less of a surprise. He had admitted to being Republican -- and I'd wondered how and why -- but I gave this attorney the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was a harmless, traditional Republican, of the sort who bemoaned the loss of the gold standard, but was otherwise enlightened. There are a scant few.
The consultant, however, was utterly baffling. An active Presbyterian who had argued with me on matters of principle ... how could an informed Christian hold such obviously racist views?
This is where I am stuck. There's an almost unconscious prevalence of views that can't be called anything else but racist.
I admit I am biased -- not on the basis of color -- against certain kinds of people. I lampoon the Southern good ol' boy with gusto (and I figure the heirs of the Confederacy deserve a taste of their own medicine). But I would readily admit to anyone that what I really know about the South and Southerners fits in a thimble. This is merely satire of a stereotype, not sociology.
But the people with whom I was speaking were, in contrast, pretty sure they were right, that the facts backed them. They were almost surprised that anyone would question such opinions.
Here we are in 2009 and one still hears outrageous things about ethnicity from Americans who have distinguished academic and professional careers, people who profess in every other respect to be civilized and open-minded.
When I try to find a reason why, I am stuck.
Don't believe it? Here are two instances in one day.
Item one: Lunch. A government lawyer complained to me about the admittedly absurd absence notes from one colleague (e.g., "my cat has a headache") and the administrative assistant who apparently manages to work all day without turning on the computer on her desk. His girlfriend proceeded to generalize about how people of the ethnicity of the two goldbrickers (whisper: "black") tend to be like that.
So I try reason: President Obama is African-American and he seems pretty hard working to me. The reply? "That's the exception."
Then I begin to make a list in my mind of black intellectuals, artists, legal scholars, biblical scholars -- and I stop. It's no use: everything has been prejudged. The only sane response is given by my companion, who insists that these comments are simply wrong.
Item two: Dinner. I express concern for my younger son's exposure to mortal danger given his choice of career (law enforcement) and a fellow diner who is a health care consultant with umpteen degrees blurts out, "Especially in D.C., which has a 70 percent black population." The implication, of course, is that the murder rate has something to do with blacks, because as we all know, whites never kill anyone.
For the second time in one day, I am dumbfounded.
I genuinely liked these people who, admittedly, were recent acquaintances. The lawyer was less of a surprise. He had admitted to being Republican -- and I'd wondered how and why -- but I gave this attorney the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was a harmless, traditional Republican, of the sort who bemoaned the loss of the gold standard, but was otherwise enlightened. There are a scant few.
The consultant, however, was utterly baffling. An active Presbyterian who had argued with me on matters of principle ... how could an informed Christian hold such obviously racist views?
This is where I am stuck. There's an almost unconscious prevalence of views that can't be called anything else but racist.
I admit I am biased -- not on the basis of color -- against certain kinds of people. I lampoon the Southern good ol' boy with gusto (and I figure the heirs of the Confederacy deserve a taste of their own medicine). But I would readily admit to anyone that what I really know about the South and Southerners fits in a thimble. This is merely satire of a stereotype, not sociology.
But the people with whom I was speaking were, in contrast, pretty sure they were right, that the facts backed them. They were almost surprised that anyone would question such opinions.
Here we are in 2009 and one still hears outrageous things about ethnicity from Americans who have distinguished academic and professional careers, people who profess in every other respect to be civilized and open-minded.
When I try to find a reason why, I am stuck.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Worst Is Over?
Hand it to the economists, business reporters and Wall Street talking heads to heave up a massive sigh of relief that "only" 345,000 people lost their jobs last month. The average Josephine on the street doesn't share the feeling because neither she nor her mate, Joe, ever see the money from profits during the booms and they always feel the pinch in the busts.
They only see the unemployment line, the cutoff notices when money begins to get tight and eventually more and more losses. Is it getting better at the home of J&J?
Let's see ... there are 14.5 million Americans unemployed. That's double the number of people who were jobless before the recession started.
This just like saying that in 2004 there was a great recovery, or that it was "morning in America" under Ronald Reagan, whose sharp rightward economic shift in 1981 brought us 9.4% unemployment precisely 27 years ago last month.
So, no, the gross domestic product may be poised to post a positive growth number. To you and me, that means nothing.
They only see the unemployment line, the cutoff notices when money begins to get tight and eventually more and more losses. Is it getting better at the home of J&J?
Let's see ... there are 14.5 million Americans unemployed. That's double the number of people who were jobless before the recession started.
This just like saying that in 2004 there was a great recovery, or that it was "morning in America" under Ronald Reagan, whose sharp rightward economic shift in 1981 brought us 9.4% unemployment precisely 27 years ago last month.
So, no, the gross domestic product may be poised to post a positive growth number. To you and me, that means nothing.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Biochemical Soul
When I was a child I used to wish I had been born in ancient Greece, so my ideas would be new. Every time I made some novel observation, Archimedes or Aristotle or Socrates had been there.
This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.
A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.
I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).
Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.
Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.
So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.
The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.
Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.
And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?
This is what happened with my thinking about the soul. I have already offered the relatively commonplace notion, scientifically, that most of the functions of what we traditionally called a "soul" are really biochemical reactions (see here). Now, I have been observing the similarity of the effects of psychiatric medications with spiritual and psychiatric schools of thought.
A professional whose gauging of emotions is central to her work takes such things for granted. But another helping professional relies on feelings. It is much like the experience of Kant and his idealist ideas: just because he couldn't prove that anything existed, it didn't mean that he didn't walk home for lunch like clockwork.
I'd already been beaten to the popularizing punt concerning chemicals and romance (see An Affair of the Head). And I knew I had been beaten when it comes to religious experiences and the chemicals of the brain (see, for example, The God Chemical).
Yet in everyday thought and popular art, we remain mired in traditional notions and vocabulary.
Indeed, what's missing in the film Angels & Demons, is not better research on religion (the few errors are minor compared to the gaffes in The Da Vinci Code) nor greater scientific accuracy (I'm told there are whoppers concerning anti-matter), but the amplification of the struggle between Galileo and the Catholic Church (or Darwin vs. Jesus) to include a third contender, for short, Freud.
So perhaps I could interpose that some medications tend to be more, shall we say, Freudian, in their approach to healing: slow and imperceptible. Others induce dreams and reveries closer to a silent retreat under Ignatius Loyola, guiding the person through a careful and conscious introspection resembling nothing so much as an examination of conscience.
The implications are tremendous. Everything ever thought, just as life itself (let's leave that for another post, shall we?) and everything that exists, is at the core a set of chemicals.
Our solar system, for example, resembles nothing better than the atom models of our school days. The sun is the nucleus and the planets and their moons and asteroids the electrons.
And we, what are we, then, but subatomic particles?
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Papa Heinz
Papa's age is past now fifty-seven,
his years the multiplicity of Heinz
spacing his work with lunchtime vino:
a siesta-less career, now come to call,
an unholy ghost he willed once lost travails.
They say he's traded secrets with the Pope
on microphonic olives in martinis;
we children know his record past reproof:
he's shown he loves his native country truly,
the one he left a life ago.
Papa wasn't always fifty-seven,
grandma's grainy pictures had him twenty:
all meant to force me down her fettuccini
to make pasta stretch me to a pole,
adroit and tall as papa's six foot two.
Now he plays America's true end-game:
his friend's been killed by men on Soviet pay,
his world has shed more blood beyond wars cold,
and lent him robes to rend in horror hate
of spilling ketchup on his beef tartare.
(Blogger's note: I wrote this in June 1978
when my father turned 57, my age today.)
his years the multiplicity of Heinz
spacing his work with lunchtime vino:
a siesta-less career, now come to call,
an unholy ghost he willed once lost travails.
They say he's traded secrets with the Pope
on microphonic olives in martinis;
we children know his record past reproof:
he's shown he loves his native country truly,
the one he left a life ago.
Papa wasn't always fifty-seven,
grandma's grainy pictures had him twenty:
all meant to force me down her fettuccini
to make pasta stretch me to a pole,
adroit and tall as papa's six foot two.
Now he plays America's true end-game:
his friend's been killed by men on Soviet pay,
his world has shed more blood beyond wars cold,
and lent him robes to rend in horror hate
of spilling ketchup on his beef tartare.
(Blogger's note: I wrote this in June 1978
when my father turned 57, my age today.)
Sunday, June 07, 2009
The Right to be Sad and Jobless
Deep in the American social psyche is the Calvinist notion that setbacks in health and finances are always the fault of the sufferer. Wealth is seen to be the sign of divine approval not as Balzac's evidence of a crime. Similarly, ever since the New England Reader we have believed that cleanliness (and healthy living) is next to godliness.
One of the most difficult things about bouts of depression is hearing the well-meaning exhortations to be happy, exercise, meditate, as if the person had set out to defy the 11th American Commandment: thou shalt be cheerful. It echoes the chorus of Wall Street traders who jeered "losers" in response to aid for laid off people who were unable to pay their mortgages.
Rationalist-minded 21st century denizens might want to revise the social norm. We might want to be cheerful about having jobs (90.6 percent of us still do) while respecting the reasonable right to a little gloom and doom when others are so moved.
Between the medieval vale of tears and the 19th century delight in progress, lies another path, still unnamed and figuratively undescribed.
One of the most difficult things about bouts of depression is hearing the well-meaning exhortations to be happy, exercise, meditate, as if the person had set out to defy the 11th American Commandment: thou shalt be cheerful. It echoes the chorus of Wall Street traders who jeered "losers" in response to aid for laid off people who were unable to pay their mortgages.
Rationalist-minded 21st century denizens might want to revise the social norm. We might want to be cheerful about having jobs (90.6 percent of us still do) while respecting the reasonable right to a little gloom and doom when others are so moved.
Between the medieval vale of tears and the 19th century delight in progress, lies another path, still unnamed and figuratively undescribed.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
June 6, 1944
Sixty five years ago, roughly 160,000 U.S., British and Canadian infantry landed in Normandy, supported by 195,000 navy men in 7,000 vessels, to drill a breach in Hitler's Atlantic Wall and liberate Europe, in what I believe remains the largest amphibious military landing in history.
Canadians landing at a beach code-named Juno faced the second highest rate of attrition on the beat (a 50% casualty rate in the first hour), but ended up the only unit to reach its military objectives by the end of the day. The highest loss of life, 60%, befell Americans at Point du Hoc. The British landed in two beaches, facing stiff resistance near Caen, which was not taken until August. Two small French contingents landed that day, one with the British in the Caen thrust, and another parachuting into Brittany attached to a British SAS commando unit.
Let us remember these men today and their awesome struggle.
Canadians landing at a beach code-named Juno faced the second highest rate of attrition on the beat (a 50% casualty rate in the first hour), but ended up the only unit to reach its military objectives by the end of the day. The highest loss of life, 60%, befell Americans at Point du Hoc. The British landed in two beaches, facing stiff resistance near Caen, which was not taken until August. Two small French contingents landed that day, one with the British in the Caen thrust, and another parachuting into Brittany attached to a British SAS commando unit.
Let us remember these men today and their awesome struggle.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Busy
I am alive. I am thinking. Material is gathering. But, I'm ...
... busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy ...
Tired of seeing the same old thing on the blog, but too busy to write a new post.
Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.
Carry on.
... busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy ...
Tired of seeing the same old thing on the blog, but too busy to write a new post.
Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.
Carry on.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Faithful? Progressive?
Blogs that wear religion on their sleeves tend to be, like churches, full of hypocrisy. I've already blogged on the Methodist preacher who, the nun who, and my latest find is Faithful Progressive, the title of which, after a little following, prompts the headline question.
The answer is "neither."
The blogger presents himself as theologically a liberal Protestant and politically as loosely left-of-center. The blogger claims to be "faithful" to Christianity and "progressive" aka "afraid to call myself socialist" but really willing to fly the flag of moral indignation.
In roughly a month or so of following the blog, FP has managed to:
-- pick the mote in the Catholic eye as regards the Nazis (without, of course, having anything new to say), while refusing to even look at the Protestant beam: the churches that allowed themselves to be merged by the Nazis into the Reich Church under Reich bishop Ludwig Muller;
-- flagrantly repeat and proudly use the schoolyard bully term "Ditchkins" (a conflation of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) as the moniker for atheists of whom the writer is obvious afraid an in awe of; and
-- flaunt the blogger's vision of the language of Cervantes as a wetback language not deserving proper use by obviously translating "Congratulations Judge Sonia Sotomayor" through a computer translator, with the result "Congratulations have judged Sonia Sotomayor," which doesn't make sense in Spanish, any more than it does in English.
When I pointed out the incredibly stupid error -- clearly the machine interpreted "judge" to be a verb ("juzgan"), not a noun ("juez") -- the blogger changed it and pretended to have intended a "pun."
The blogger, who is apparently obviouslyangry at afraid of atheist critics, insists the originator of "Ditchkins" has written a "great read."
On the Nazi point, he pretended not to even hear the criticism.
And to my pointing that his blog, which has far too many quotes from other sources and exceedingly little original material, violated the Associated Press' copyright, he replies that "You[r] toady sucking up to the AP is also reflective of the tendency of the new atheists to be a reactionary cultural force."
So, there it is: faithful to Christian charity? No. Progressive? Only in the weasel sense.
The guy doesn't have a clue.
The answer is "neither."
The blogger presents himself as theologically a liberal Protestant and politically as loosely left-of-center. The blogger claims to be "faithful" to Christianity and "progressive" aka "afraid to call myself socialist" but really willing to fly the flag of moral indignation.
In roughly a month or so of following the blog, FP has managed to:
-- pick the mote in the Catholic eye as regards the Nazis (without, of course, having anything new to say), while refusing to even look at the Protestant beam: the churches that allowed themselves to be merged by the Nazis into the Reich Church under Reich bishop Ludwig Muller;
-- flagrantly repeat and proudly use the schoolyard bully term "Ditchkins" (a conflation of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) as the moniker for atheists of whom the writer is obvious afraid an in awe of; and
-- flaunt the blogger's vision of the language of Cervantes as a wetback language not deserving proper use by obviously translating "Congratulations Judge Sonia Sotomayor" through a computer translator, with the result "Congratulations have judged Sonia Sotomayor," which doesn't make sense in Spanish, any more than it does in English.
When I pointed out the incredibly stupid error -- clearly the machine interpreted "judge" to be a verb ("juzgan"), not a noun ("juez") -- the blogger changed it and pretended to have intended a "pun."
The blogger, who is apparently obviously
On the Nazi point, he pretended not to even hear the criticism.
And to my pointing that his blog, which has far too many quotes from other sources and exceedingly little original material, violated the Associated Press' copyright, he replies that "You[r] toady sucking up to the AP is also reflective of the tendency of the new atheists to be a reactionary cultural force."
So, there it is: faithful to Christian charity? No. Progressive? Only in the weasel sense.
The guy doesn't have a clue.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
It’s not a boy!
When is it good news that it's not a boy? When it's a woman. That, at least, is my take on the handsome Puerto Rico-born Cuban-American young Catholic priest photographed in an amorous embrace on the beach with ... wait for it ... an attractive, bikini-clad young woman.
The pictures of the priest, Alberto Cutié, also nicknamed Miami's “Padre Oprah,” for his Spanish language television and radio talk shows, appeared in a Spanish gossip magazine called TV Notas, leading to his suspension from parish work by the Archdiocese of Miami.
What the major Anglo press — or the Catholic hierarchy for that matter — doesn't get is the persistent cultural message underlying this kind of incident.
“If only it were the worst thing that a Roman Catholic priest has been caught doing,” Time's Tim Padgett took time out from the earthshaking news to editorialize in his lead. Meanwhile, to The New York Times' reporter Damien Cave, Cutié's problem is that he works in “South Beach, where even the mannequins have extra-large breasts.”
They're missing the point and it's not like they didn't have warning, either. Do you remember the last time a Hispanic clergyman got famously caught swimming in forbidden sexual waters?
It was Bobby Sánchez, the former archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who in the 1980s had more than a dozen angry women after him, once they all found out he was cheating on them with holy mother church.
Truth in commentary: Sánchez headed the U.S. Catholic bishops' Hispanic Affairs Committee, for which I once worked and I'd heard the stories about Sánchez and his womanizing long before it was headline news.
Yet precisely because the Sánchez and Cutié cases lie at the intersection of the two most misreported areas of news —` Hispanics and religion — no one has yet stumbled onto the most notable and historically consistent point that might be made about traditionally Catholic Hispanic men.
They like women.
They love to have a passel of kids with women, occasionally even with more than one woman at a time. Latin American literature, which is the informal sociology about things one does not bring up at the dinner table en familia, is replete with examples of such men – and they all ring true.
Moreover, they absolutely despise the notion of celibacy.
Want homegrown proof right here and now? The number of married Hispanic Catholic permanent deacons in the United States, who carry out some ministerial functions, albeit well short of a priest's, is very many times higher than that of U.S. Hispanic priests.
There are, too, Hispanics with vocations, my esteemed bishops. They just don't want to be celibate.
In Latin America, which has the world's largest Catholic population -- or about 350 million out of the nearly 1 billion Catholics in the world – there are fewer Catholic priests than the number serving the 60 million U.S. Catholics.
Until the very late 20th century, Bolivia, a country to which Spanish missionaries first went in the 1500s, had never had a native-born bishop. As with most of the Latin American Catholic clergy, they had all been imported.
And here's the one point Time and The New York Times should have been able to dig up all on their own: according to a well-known FBI criminal profile, 80 percent of all pedophiles are non-Hispanic white males. Hispanic males comprised a tiny sliver of the remaining 20 percent.
Look at the rogue's gallery of child-raping U.S. priests made infamous in the past decade or so: almost all of them are Irish-American, not Hispanic.
Ready to get an inkling about Hispanics in religion, major news media? Let me beat the horse just one bit deader than a doornail.
Time magazine headline writers had fun with the episode, dubbing the South Beach paparazzi shots "The Father Cutie Scandal." Get it? Alberto Cutié is a “cutie.”
But guess what? Cutié is pronounced coo-tea-EH, not as the Valley-Girl-speak word for handsome. That's OK, when it comes to Hispanics, major media journalists might as well all be Valley Girls.
The pictures of the priest, Alberto Cutié, also nicknamed Miami's “Padre Oprah,” for his Spanish language television and radio talk shows, appeared in a Spanish gossip magazine called TV Notas, leading to his suspension from parish work by the Archdiocese of Miami.
What the major Anglo press — or the Catholic hierarchy for that matter — doesn't get is the persistent cultural message underlying this kind of incident.
“If only it were the worst thing that a Roman Catholic priest has been caught doing,” Time's Tim Padgett took time out from the earthshaking news to editorialize in his lead. Meanwhile, to The New York Times' reporter Damien Cave, Cutié's problem is that he works in “South Beach, where even the mannequins have extra-large breasts.”
They're missing the point and it's not like they didn't have warning, either. Do you remember the last time a Hispanic clergyman got famously caught swimming in forbidden sexual waters?
It was Bobby Sánchez, the former archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who in the 1980s had more than a dozen angry women after him, once they all found out he was cheating on them with holy mother church.
Truth in commentary: Sánchez headed the U.S. Catholic bishops' Hispanic Affairs Committee, for which I once worked and I'd heard the stories about Sánchez and his womanizing long before it was headline news.
Yet precisely because the Sánchez and Cutié cases lie at the intersection of the two most misreported areas of news —` Hispanics and religion — no one has yet stumbled onto the most notable and historically consistent point that might be made about traditionally Catholic Hispanic men.
They like women.
They love to have a passel of kids with women, occasionally even with more than one woman at a time. Latin American literature, which is the informal sociology about things one does not bring up at the dinner table en familia, is replete with examples of such men – and they all ring true.
Moreover, they absolutely despise the notion of celibacy.
Want homegrown proof right here and now? The number of married Hispanic Catholic permanent deacons in the United States, who carry out some ministerial functions, albeit well short of a priest's, is very many times higher than that of U.S. Hispanic priests.
There are, too, Hispanics with vocations, my esteemed bishops. They just don't want to be celibate.
In Latin America, which has the world's largest Catholic population -- or about 350 million out of the nearly 1 billion Catholics in the world – there are fewer Catholic priests than the number serving the 60 million U.S. Catholics.
Until the very late 20th century, Bolivia, a country to which Spanish missionaries first went in the 1500s, had never had a native-born bishop. As with most of the Latin American Catholic clergy, they had all been imported.
And here's the one point Time and The New York Times should have been able to dig up all on their own: according to a well-known FBI criminal profile, 80 percent of all pedophiles are non-Hispanic white males. Hispanic males comprised a tiny sliver of the remaining 20 percent.
Look at the rogue's gallery of child-raping U.S. priests made infamous in the past decade or so: almost all of them are Irish-American, not Hispanic.
Ready to get an inkling about Hispanics in religion, major news media? Let me beat the horse just one bit deader than a doornail.
Time magazine headline writers had fun with the episode, dubbing the South Beach paparazzi shots "The Father Cutie Scandal." Get it? Alberto Cutié is a “cutie.”
But guess what? Cutié is pronounced coo-tea-EH, not as the Valley-Girl-speak word for handsome. That's OK, when it comes to Hispanics, major media journalists might as well all be Valley Girls.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
A Model for Pelosi
On one of my favorite blogs I recently caught the headline
Speaker quits 'for sake of unity'
then I realized it was not what I thought. But what a great idea for Nancy Pelosi!!!!!
Frankly, I don't care what the CIA told her or what she heard, but she has been such a spinelessly rotten vote counter, such a roll-over-and-play-deadRepub Democratic House follower leader that she really should quit while she's behind.
Speaker quits 'for sake of unity'
then I realized it was not what I thought. But what a great idea for Nancy Pelosi!!!!!Frankly, I don't care what the CIA told her or what she heard, but she has been such a spinelessly rotten vote counter, such a roll-over-and-play-dead
Friday, May 22, 2009
The Problem with Being Kennedyesque
President Obama has turned out to be more Kennedyesque than some of his fans expected. One does not have to be an opponent of Obama, or of the once-young Boston-accented politician of the past, to mean "Kennedyesque" in the realpolitik and less than idealistic sense.
I was once told that when the beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was shown where, as archbishop of Chicago, he would be buried, he learned that his spot was to the left of his predecessor, John Cody, who died just before the feds could indict him of misusing church funds.
"I was always a bit to his left," Bernardin is said to have quipped.
John F. Kennedy, since the 1964 Democratic Convention the icon of liberals, stood in many respects to the liberals' right. Barack Obama, in trying to reverse course on the Bush Administration's campaign of state-sponsored terror, has revealed himself more pragmatic about Guantánamo and torture evidence than his supporters from, say, Code Pink or Move On would like.
If Obama can compromise on Nuremberg-scale inhumanity, some worry, what will he give away to get something through in health, consumer protections and workers' rights to collective bargaining? To my mind, that's the wrong question.
Obama doesn't want to say the right things for eight years, as Bill Clinton did, so some Republican can come, like Bush did, and turn peace in Ireland and Yugoslavia into unending war throughout the entire Arab world. He doesn't want to tidy up the books, turning Republican deficits into surpluses as far as the eye can see, just so some crass successor can undo it with a sea of red ink and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
That would not be good for the country, any more than it would burnish Obama's legacy. As a man of extraordinary intelligence, Obama knows this. The man knows what he is doing.
I was once told that when the beloved Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was shown where, as archbishop of Chicago, he would be buried, he learned that his spot was to the left of his predecessor, John Cody, who died just before the feds could indict him of misusing church funds.
"I was always a bit to his left," Bernardin is said to have quipped.
John F. Kennedy, since the 1964 Democratic Convention the icon of liberals, stood in many respects to the liberals' right. Barack Obama, in trying to reverse course on the Bush Administration's campaign of state-sponsored terror, has revealed himself more pragmatic about Guantánamo and torture evidence than his supporters from, say, Code Pink or Move On would like.
If Obama can compromise on Nuremberg-scale inhumanity, some worry, what will he give away to get something through in health, consumer protections and workers' rights to collective bargaining? To my mind, that's the wrong question.
Obama doesn't want to say the right things for eight years, as Bill Clinton did, so some Republican can come, like Bush did, and turn peace in Ireland and Yugoslavia into unending war throughout the entire Arab world. He doesn't want to tidy up the books, turning Republican deficits into surpluses as far as the eye can see, just so some crass successor can undo it with a sea of red ink and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
That would not be good for the country, any more than it would burnish Obama's legacy. As a man of extraordinary intelligence, Obama knows this. The man knows what he is doing.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Three Deaths
George, Lew, my father. Two generational contemporaries dead within days, one dead almost 30 years ago recalled by fluke in the same week.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
George was a humorous cyberfriend I never met in the flesh, but I had a good sense of his character.
Lew would not have died in the arms of his wife if I had not told him, years ago, that she planned to dump him as a boyfriend. And if he had not redoubled his campaign to win her heart.
My father's death was a tragedy for the personal mess he left in his wake, but it's a psychic mess I had long ago cleaned up until I ran into someone who asked me if I had heard of a man by the same name ... my father, by the details.
Then there's my own death, of which I have dreamed. I dreamed of everyone carrying on just fine without me. (Drat!) No funeral cortege to Arlington, no heads of state flying in. Nothing. Just another nobody gone.
Death talk is unfashionable in this society, in which we proclaim the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet death is a reality of life. Closer when those not far from one's own age begin to die.
Now you know why I haven't posted anything. I was thinking about death.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
A Gift for TANF Mothers
The term "welfare mother" has been so loaded that I chose for the heading the bureaucratic abbreviation of the current program. After all, ever since Ronald Reagan invented out of whole cloth a public aid cheater in Chicago, some people deem a welfare mom as practically a criminal -- all to justify sending poor mothers with infants to work outside the home.
Indeed, I found myself nodding when, during a visit to Washington a few years ago, the head of the United Kingdom's social programs under Tony Blair made clear that, forcing a mother with children under six to leave home to perform mindless low-skill work was so horrifying to the British public, that it had never been even suggested in Parliament.
What we have done since 1996 to poor women heading households with children in the United States is unspeakable. What we did before wasn't much better.
Now we tell them to go out get the first menial job they can, or else we'll cut them off the cash from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the TANF in the heading) -- and amount ranging from about $230 a month in Mississippi to about $950 in New York.That's below poverty? Add SNAP (the new name for food stamps) and public housing subsidies. It comes close to the poverty line. Not much more.
Since when is making sure a child is fed, loved, cared for -- in a word, mothering -- less important than flipping burgers or sitting at a cash register?
Conservatives argue that these women make lousy mothers, since they are all on [add drug of the day here] and work as [insert sexual occupations serving conservative customers here]. Or they're lazy and uneducated and [add whisper] black.
In fact, most welfare mothers are white. Let's factually adjust the picture just enough to conjure up an image to which most Americans, even the stupidest, will react to with a smidgen of compassion. A poor white woman is a WPA work of art, no?
But even if we think the worst of welfare mothers, isn't the drugs, prostitution, compulsive TV watching, etc., largely a result of nurture rather than nature? Couldn't this behavior be changed?
Imagine a modern equivalent of a "sewing circle": a daily, neighborhood gathering of TANF moms with non-TANF peers and an older, motherly role model who had raised children of her own.There would be opportunities for peer-to-peer problem solving, career exploration, even eventual job search or home-brewed microenterprises (yes, I know all the lingo).
Wouldn't that be much, much better than merely throwing them out into the labor market with no skills? Wouldn't that be better than denying cash, food, housing? Throwing them and their children out like garbage?
Some brave people are attempting things like this, but it's far from being national policy with serious resources. That should be our Mother's Day's gift to all TANF moms.
Indeed, I found myself nodding when, during a visit to Washington a few years ago, the head of the United Kingdom's social programs under Tony Blair made clear that, forcing a mother with children under six to leave home to perform mindless low-skill work was so horrifying to the British public, that it had never been even suggested in Parliament.
What we have done since 1996 to poor women heading households with children in the United States is unspeakable. What we did before wasn't much better.
Now we tell them to go out get the first menial job they can, or else we'll cut them off the cash from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the TANF in the heading) -- and amount ranging from about $230 a month in Mississippi to about $950 in New York.That's below poverty? Add SNAP (the new name for food stamps) and public housing subsidies. It comes close to the poverty line. Not much more.
Since when is making sure a child is fed, loved, cared for -- in a word, mothering -- less important than flipping burgers or sitting at a cash register?
Conservatives argue that these women make lousy mothers, since they are all on [add drug of the day here] and work as [insert sexual occupations serving conservative customers here]. Or they're lazy and uneducated and [add whisper] black.
In fact, most welfare mothers are white. Let's factually adjust the picture just enough to conjure up an image to which most Americans, even the stupidest, will react to with a smidgen of compassion. A poor white woman is a WPA work of art, no?
But even if we think the worst of welfare mothers, isn't the drugs, prostitution, compulsive TV watching, etc., largely a result of nurture rather than nature? Couldn't this behavior be changed?
Imagine a modern equivalent of a "sewing circle": a daily, neighborhood gathering of TANF moms with non-TANF peers and an older, motherly role model who had raised children of her own.There would be opportunities for peer-to-peer problem solving, career exploration, even eventual job search or home-brewed microenterprises (yes, I know all the lingo).
Wouldn't that be much, much better than merely throwing them out into the labor market with no skills? Wouldn't that be better than denying cash, food, housing? Throwing them and their children out like garbage?
Some brave people are attempting things like this, but it's far from being national policy with serious resources. That should be our Mother's Day's gift to all TANF moms.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Gay Style?
I am going to get killed here, but Andy of V and A in Milan prompted me to finally give vent to an idea I have had for many years when he wrote, in what seemed like a bit of exasperation, "I have been called the straightest of gay men."
The topic of our sermon, boys and girls, is: Is there a gay style and if so what should it be? This could also be: Is there a "straight" style and what should that be?
This is interesting to me, someone who is often taken in cyberspace to be a woman (see latest in the comments section here), even though I am of the male persuasion (although I have expressed an interest in becoming lesbian, for which I have been told I have an aptitude). Perhaps the confusion arises because I don't punctuate every sentence with "eff'in A!"?
This is also interesting because I was there when a college roommate declared himself gay at 3 am, after an evening at the local gay alliance; unfortunately, I had a final exam the next morning and really needed the sleep, so that discussion was postponed, much to his drunken chagrin.
CR, as I'll call him, had been up to that point a normal, average ... um, what am I saying? He liked opera, fer cryin' out loud! (OK, so my father loved opera -- his Italian heritage -- and that's why I hate it, but that's a whole other story).
All right, what I mean is that CR didn't have any noticeable mannerisms in his gesture or voice. He wasn't "affeminate."
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I hired him at what was his fast-approaching middle age (he is a few years older than I am). All of a sudden, he behaved like a typical 40-ish female secretary of the 1950s.
You know, the kind that has her hair up in a bouffant and whose fingers taper into painted claws and whose mouth and cheeks are rouged and powdered and whose perfume can be smelled a mile away. One day she quits in a huff and her desk drawers are found to be filled to the rafters with tissue paper and various female cosmetic and medical supplies. Gary Larson used to draw her to great effect (see here).
No, CR didn't look like one. He just talked like one, freaked out like one (you won't believe his antics on 9/11 ... OK, so we were a block from the White House, but honestly!) and generally behaved in a way that completely belied his physical appearance as a tall, lean, Brahmin WASP man.
What is it about a man's sexual preference for other men that demands behavior that apes the worst stereotypes of a traditional woman? I mean, most women today are more "macho" than that!
Give me a woman who knows how to handle a power drill any day.
Frankly, I have no answer. I am relieved to learn that Andy, a gay man, doesn't seem to have an answer, either. It shows that it's a not just me, a straight guy, asking an unreasonable question.
The topic of our sermon, boys and girls, is: Is there a gay style and if so what should it be? This could also be: Is there a "straight" style and what should that be?
This is interesting to me, someone who is often taken in cyberspace to be a woman (see latest in the comments section here), even though I am of the male persuasion (although I have expressed an interest in becoming lesbian, for which I have been told I have an aptitude). Perhaps the confusion arises because I don't punctuate every sentence with "eff'in A!"?
This is also interesting because I was there when a college roommate declared himself gay at 3 am, after an evening at the local gay alliance; unfortunately, I had a final exam the next morning and really needed the sleep, so that discussion was postponed, much to his drunken chagrin.
CR, as I'll call him, had been up to that point a normal, average ... um, what am I saying? He liked opera, fer cryin' out loud! (OK, so my father loved opera -- his Italian heritage -- and that's why I hate it, but that's a whole other story).
All right, what I mean is that CR didn't have any noticeable mannerisms in his gesture or voice. He wasn't "affeminate."
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I hired him at what was his fast-approaching middle age (he is a few years older than I am). All of a sudden, he behaved like a typical 40-ish female secretary of the 1950s.
You know, the kind that has her hair up in a bouffant and whose fingers taper into painted claws and whose mouth and cheeks are rouged and powdered and whose perfume can be smelled a mile away. One day she quits in a huff and her desk drawers are found to be filled to the rafters with tissue paper and various female cosmetic and medical supplies. Gary Larson used to draw her to great effect (see here).
No, CR didn't look like one. He just talked like one, freaked out like one (you won't believe his antics on 9/11 ... OK, so we were a block from the White House, but honestly!) and generally behaved in a way that completely belied his physical appearance as a tall, lean, Brahmin WASP man.
What is it about a man's sexual preference for other men that demands behavior that apes the worst stereotypes of a traditional woman? I mean, most women today are more "macho" than that!
Give me a woman who knows how to handle a power drill any day.
Frankly, I have no answer. I am relieved to learn that Andy, a gay man, doesn't seem to have an answer, either. It shows that it's a not just me, a straight guy, asking an unreasonable question.
Monday, May 04, 2009
End of the American Façade
Most of us have been disappointed with some essentials of American culture, mostly because they were never any deeper, any more solid than a Hollywood set, since at least 1968. This is one of those moments in which such myths can be recreated or be superseded -- and this little essay aims to aid the latter.
Let's look at the year 1968 for a moment. That is the time when, to hear candidate Barack Obama tell it last year, one group of Boomers pit itself against another in a hatred that has lasted a generation.
The year 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, when the fortress myth of American invincibility was first breached in the war that would deal the nation its first defeat. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and the notion of successful nonviolent change suffered a deadly blow. That was the year the last great white hope, Robert F. Kennedy, perished -- he was consumed, I still think, by the self-destructive forces of the power of money from which, ironically, he sprang.
The news media told us of students in Paris accused of instigating a deep crisis and later of peers in Prague hailed, from the West, as heroes -- yet all of them (us, it was my generation) were in the same dionysian revolt against our apollonian elders. And what did we achieve?
The cult of youth, too, turned out to be a false god, especially evident now that we are no longer young. The only surefire result of the Democratic Convention riots was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- if only it could have been foreseen and prevented!
But it couldn't. At heart we Americans are much too fond of our essential self-delusion that we can overcome everything and anything.
Everything about an American and the degree of his or her success is fake. Fake it 'till you make it, runs what seems to be the quintessential American nursery rhyme. We spend lifetimes telling one another that "everything is great."
Happiness is a constitutional right, we believe (and no, it's not there). And it is a duty. If you are sick or you are poor, it's your damned fault.
Yet none of it is true. Indeed, not only is America the land of the false optimism, it's also the land of the scam.
Go back to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and even to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Our Protestant, Calvinist, capitalist ethos and its anxiety inspiring lies are writ large in our literature and culture.
Yet at times such as these, when the wages of our collective prevarication come due, we have the remarkable opportunity to tell ourselves the truth: perhaps we have just muddled through with a bit of luck and perhaps we could recognize that not all that glitters is gold. Or is that too Catholic, medieval and fatalistically feudal?
Let's look at the year 1968 for a moment. That is the time when, to hear candidate Barack Obama tell it last year, one group of Boomers pit itself against another in a hatred that has lasted a generation.
The year 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, when the fortress myth of American invincibility was first breached in the war that would deal the nation its first defeat. That was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and the notion of successful nonviolent change suffered a deadly blow. That was the year the last great white hope, Robert F. Kennedy, perished -- he was consumed, I still think, by the self-destructive forces of the power of money from which, ironically, he sprang.
The news media told us of students in Paris accused of instigating a deep crisis and later of peers in Prague hailed, from the West, as heroes -- yet all of them (us, it was my generation) were in the same dionysian revolt against our apollonian elders. And what did we achieve?
The cult of youth, too, turned out to be a false god, especially evident now that we are no longer young. The only surefire result of the Democratic Convention riots was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 -- if only it could have been foreseen and prevented!
But it couldn't. At heart we Americans are much too fond of our essential self-delusion that we can overcome everything and anything.
Everything about an American and the degree of his or her success is fake. Fake it 'till you make it, runs what seems to be the quintessential American nursery rhyme. We spend lifetimes telling one another that "everything is great."
Happiness is a constitutional right, we believe (and no, it's not there). And it is a duty. If you are sick or you are poor, it's your damned fault.
Yet none of it is true. Indeed, not only is America the land of the false optimism, it's also the land of the scam.
Go back to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and even to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Our Protestant, Calvinist, capitalist ethos and its anxiety inspiring lies are writ large in our literature and culture.
Yet at times such as these, when the wages of our collective prevarication come due, we have the remarkable opportunity to tell ourselves the truth: perhaps we have just muddled through with a bit of luck and perhaps we could recognize that not all that glitters is gold. Or is that too Catholic, medieval and fatalistically feudal?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Preparing for Living
In advance of the coming economic bad news -- bank "stress test" results on Monday, unemployment on Friday -- allow me to ponder what is really happening at a level that affects all of us: a profound job insecurity that won't get better even when the so-called "macro" numbers look better.
Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."
In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.
Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:
Then allow me to bring up a comment by my friend and reader Luciano in response to my post of March 19: "Post-industrial production is production without labor. This means the END OF THE JOB. Repeat after me: The AGE OF THE JOB is past. The traditional 'job,' which has determined our consciousness for 300 years, is gone forever. The jobs now being lost will not come back. We don't need the workers anymore."
In technical principle, this has been possible for at least half a century. A relatively small -- and declining -- proportion of the population is needed to produce the materials essential to human dignity, such as food, clothing and shelter, much as was foreseen by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren."
He saw the end of "the struggle for subsistence" in the then-unthinkable year of 2030. That struggle persists today largely due to disparities and injustices, but not actual need. We have and produce more than enough for everyone.
Confront the equity issue, however, and we come to the real future problem, also prophesied by Keynes:
... for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.This is what today's children -- who will be young adults in 2030 -- should be learning: the art of life itself. This is education not merely to have a skill to make a living, but education to learn how to learn and live and grow, in harmony and fairness.
The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Ugly American as a Nunny Bunny
You know how when you notice something it's suddenly all around you? This is happening to me with international do-gooder women and their irretrievably imperious Ugly American attitudes.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
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