I grew up off Ardennes Ave in a neighborhood with WWII themed street names. Built for vets. Yeah.

From The Writer's Almanac, earlier this month:

It was on this day in 1944 that the Battle of the Bulge began. It took place in the Ardennes forest, a snowy mountainous region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg and lasted for more than a month. It was the last major German offensive, and it was the bloodiest battle of World War II for Americans troops. While estimates about the number of American casualties differ, the U.S. Defense Department lists 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded, and 23,000 missing.

Among those taken as prisoner of war by the Germans was a young infantry scout named Kurt Vonnegut. He'd only been in the front lines for five days when he got trapped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner. Within a month, he was sent over to Dresden and put to work in a factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He and his fellow American prisoners were detained in and slept at an underground warehouse in Dresden that had been a meat-packing facility and storage locker before the war. The building was marked 'Schlachthof-funf': 'Slaughterhouse-Five.'

Then, in February 1945, about two months after the Battle of the Bulge began, British and American forces started firebombing Dresden. The firestorm created by the massive Allied bombings killed nearly all of Dresden's residents, but Vonnegut and other POWs survived because they were three stories underground, in that meat-storage locker.




Vonnegut published his novel Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, a quarter century after he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and a witness to the Dresden firebombing. In it, he wrote:

'It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'

The Battle of the Bulge ended on January 25, 1945, after Hitler agreed to withdraw German troops from the Ardennes forest. Less than two weeks later, Allied leaders met at Yalta to discuss occupying post-war Germany.


The New York Times:

When Theodore Roosevelt was president, three decades before World War II, the world was focused on the bloody Russo-Japanese War, a contest for control of North Asia. President Roosevelt was no fan of the Russians: “No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant — in short, as untrustworthy in every way — as the Russians,” he wrote in August 1905, near the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, on the other hand, were “a wonderful and civilized people,” Roosevelt wrote, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”

Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”

In June 1905, Roosevelt made world headlines when — apparently on his own initiative — he invited the two nations to negotiate an end to their war. Roosevelt’s private letter to his son told another story: “I have of course concealed from everyone — literally everyone — the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion ... . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.”

Years later, a Japanese emissary to Roosevelt paraphrased the president’s comments to him: “All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine, preserved the Latin American nations from European interference. The future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States towards their neighbors on the American continent.”

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.

To signal his commitment to Tokyo, Roosevelt cut off relations with Korea, turned the American legation in Seoul over to the Japanese military and deleted the word “Korea” from the State Department’s Record of Foreign Relations and placed it under the heading of “Japan.”

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

Japan’s declaration of war, in December 1941, explained its position quite clearly: “It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.”

"Nobel Peace Prize President Obama Calls For More War"

- OfficialWire headline. This guy's kind of a nut, but he's got some stuff dead on.

A paraphrase of a quote:

History may not repeat itself, but it does seem to rhyme.
-The New Yorker

The original:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

(Yeah, okay, it's not the right Pope; sue me.)

It was on [November 30] in 1095 that Pope Urban II, while on a speaking tour in France, called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. There was no imminent threat. Muslims had occupied Jerusalem for hundreds of years. But Urban II had noticed that Europe was becoming an increasingly violent place, with low-level knights killing each other over their land rights, and he thought that he could bring peace to the Christian world by directing all that violence against an outside enemy. So he made up stories of how Turks in Jerusalem were torturing and killing Christians, and anyone who was willing to join the fight against them would go to heaven.


About 100,000 men from France, Germany, and Italy answered the call, formed into several large groups, and marched across Asia Minor to the Middle East. Nearly half of them died from exhaustion and sickness before they ever reached their destination. They began sacking cities along the way, and they fought among each other for the spoils of each battle. When they reached the trading city of Antioch, they killed almost everyone, including the Christians who lived there. By the time they got to Jerusalem, it had recently fallen into the hands of Egyptians, who were friendly with the Vatican. But the crusaders attacked anyway, killing every Muslim they could find. The Jews in the city gathered in the temple, and the crusaders set it on fire. Pope Urban II died two weeks later, never hearing the news.

-The Writer's Almanac

You've got your tax cuts in my bailout! (or: Where's My Bailout?)

Comments posted to an article in The Nation about unemployment and the White House's jobs summit thing:

Joblessness? What's the big deal? Why don't we just spend 100 trillion dollars and pay everyone in America $1,000,000 per year! Problem solved!
Isn't liberal economics fun?
-Posted by pontificus at 12/02/2009 @ 09:09am

Or cut 100 trillion in taxes to Steve Forbes and Citgo...and we can all get jobs writing for a magazine or working on an oil rig?
Isn't conservative economics fun?
-Posted by Mask at 12/02/2009 @ 09:26am

look at post #2 and #3...this is essentially the nation anonymous web postings boiled down to two opposing sides...
and this is how we rant, over and over and over, forever...
it's a wonderful life!
-Posted by urmygyro at 12/02/2009 @ 09:30am

One thing Americans should be thankful for this Thanksgiving

...is that they have not put on as much weight as the average turkey. Between 1960 and 2008, turkeys bulked up by around 11lb (5kg) to 29lb, an increase of 64%, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Coincidentally, in that same period the average American man gained 28lb, almost the equivalent of a turkey, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another government agency, and a Gallup poll of 2008. This year an estimated 250m turkeys will be raised, 8% fewer than a year ago, but still almost enough for one bird each for America's 308m people.



-The Economist

Twenty-three by Liam Rector

When he was 23 and beautiful
He liked to hang around
With other beautiful people.

He liked to get intoxicated with them,
Have sex with them, make money
With them. Among them,

He found, one did not have to strain.
Other people
Wanted to hang around with them

And came bearing gifts,
A little something. (These
Gift-bearers were a lot like

Politics itself is, "Showbiz
For ugly people.") In this world
If anything went wrong there

Was always enough money around
To cover it. After he was through
With this crowd he started hanging

Out with a bunch of academic
Gangsters. These were
A different crew altogether:

Smart, on the main, but mean
And eaten alive by resentment.
They never had enough money

And were bitter beyond belief,
Compared, say,
To a troupe of electricians.

Freud said somewhere
In our unconscious
We are always 23.

("Twenty-three" by Liam Rector, from The Executive Director of the Fallen World. (c) University of Chicago Press, 2006.)

Dicks.

On this day in 1973, school officials in Drake, North Dakota, burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt Vonnegut had served in WWII, and he was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city. For years, he tried to find a way to tell his story. Meanwhile, he went to graduate school in anthropology, worked at General Electric, got married and had three kids and adopted three more, and struggled to find his voice as a writer. His stories kept falling flat -- too serious and straightforward. But finally he wrote his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, which was published in 1969. It was extremely popular and for the most part it got great reviews, but it has been banned many times, for being obscene, violent, and for its unpatriotic description of the war.

In 1973, a 26-year-old high school English teacher assigned Slaughterhouse-Five to his students, and most of them loved it, thought it was the best book they had read in a long time. But one student complained to her mom about the obscene language, and that mom took it to the principal, and the school board voted that it should be not only confiscated from the students (who were only a third of their way through the book), but also burned. Many of the students didn't want to give up their books, so the school searched all their lockers and took them, and then threw the books into the school's burner. While the school board was at it, they decided to burn Deliverance by James Dickey and a short-story anthology.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to one of the members of the school board, and he said:

"Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books -- books you hadn't even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real."

In recent years, several churches across the United States have organized public burnings of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

The Writer's Almanac for November 10, 2009
Listen: http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,j144,dv,mjb,z6o,ddg7,fqwa

Me and media (online reports & radio), a conversation from last night. (or: the Day the Military Died)

A little more than twelve hours ago:

It’s come home. Again. But, maybe, only truly for the first-time. Finally, here, the meta-psychical costs are being paid, at the home front—the worst shooting at a military base, ever. They, whoever—some guy—were, are soldiers. The apparent antagonist is a psychiatrist. And he’s alive. I’d like to hear what he’s got to say. I don’t like the looks of him, his name. This might be a big fucking pebble in the pond. I can only imagine, since I’ve no access, in what way the cable news channels are tweaking-out on this. This is going to be, this is big.




[Headlines:]

Muslim groups fear backlash after Fort Hood shooting

Muslim, Arab Groups Condemn Fort Hood Shooting, Brace For Backlash

“At this juncture, again, there is no concrete reporting as to whether Nidal Malik Hasan was in fact a Muslim or an Arab. All that has been reported is that he served in the Department of Psychology at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda Naval Facility in Bethesda, Maryland. He is believed to be 39 or 40 years old.”

“…his family is shocked by Hasan's actions and that Hasan was a "good American":

Both his parents are American, I want to make sure everyone understands, he was a good American, and we are shocked.

Contrary to prior reports, Hasan has "always been Muslim" and is not a recent convert.”




[Oh, this is fucked:] Stand up to the aggressors. Shooting at Little Rock. Bombs in Times Square.

Nidal Malik Hasan. Barack Hussein Obama. [This is not good. Not good, at all. It is] “horrifying,” Obama says.

[I’m scared to turn on the radio. But I do. It’s not any better.]

A psychiatrist on his way to Iraq. A motive? Yes. Two others? High kill count, begs more shooters. Still on lock down. Someone in your own mist…. And on Wall St., today. Shortage of seasonal flu vaccine because of swine flu vaccines priority. Bernard Kerik screwed. Global warming bill held up by Republicans. Such people will go to hell, says Taliban leader. Militants in Yemen.

Same day as Saddam Hussein sentenced to death 3 years ago today.

[Looking to be a serious case of shooting one’s own foot.]

Palestinian parents. [Oh, that’s great.] Looking more and more like only one shooter. From Virginia Tech, [ha. Lee’s, his former co-worker, is beginning to get fucked.] Why didn’t he come forward before?

Born and raised American. When do we hear about the religion of murderers? …Naval oranges. [Hassidic construction tips. Catskills.] Absorption. A huge, huge problem. [Hassid-lish. He’s hawking tiles. He says, he doesn’t usually do this. Sure.] These tiles can withhold heat or cold.




[Why didn’t they let him out?]

Why didn’t he shoot up the chain of command? Why these servicemen? This is gonna be white-washed, says military psychologist, the MI screwed up.... Eventually, we’re just gonna say enough of it, and treat them all like the enemy. Muslims need to step up, or they’ll be suspect. We’re just gonna get tired of it. –I like him. He's a psychologist, but he talks real: doesn't make excuses for abhorrent behavior.

Nine Bodies

About Australia's Black Saturday wildfires, earlier this year.

The Inferno by Christine Kenneally
The New Yorker, October 26, 2009

"The death toll rose from fifteen to a hundred and seventy-three. It was clear that some bodies would never be recovered, having been effectively cremated. Others were found unburned in positions that suggested that they had simply dropped dead while running from the flame; the radiant heat from a bushfire, which can ignite mattresses and curtains through closed windows, can kill at a considerable distance more or less instantaneously. Survivors with even more excruciating stories. As people had escaped, they had seen they neighbors bodies lying in the streets. A few days after the fire, police found a house with the remains of nine bodies: eight adults had formed a protective huddle around a baby."

Kowabunga, douche.

Education For Extinction:
American Indians and the Boarding School Experience
by David Wallace Adams

Classroom

"Probably more significant than the specific content of the science curriculum was the deeper message being transmitted. Traditionally, Indian children had been taught to look upon nature in ecological and spiritual terms. To know nature was to recognize one's dependence on the earth and its creatures. The world of nature was inseparable from the world of the supernatural; gods and spirits inhabited the earth, sky and lakes just as every living creature--the deer, the eagle, the mountain lion--possessed its own distinctive spiritual essence, which, through rights and ceremonies, might be incorporated into one's being as a sustaining source of personal identity and power..."

Sounds like Halloween to me.

"...In the end, the Indian's knowledge of the physical and natural environment was inseparable from how they approached it--intimately, harmoniously, and with reverential respect for the mysterious. Whites, on the other hand, objectified nature. Western science was ultimately the search for "laws of nature" and scientific principles that, once established, could be put to the service of technological progress. Nature was to be controlled, conquered and, finally, exploited."

Kind of like how the Indians themselves were to be: controlled, conquered and exploited.

"Science too was an expression of the white man's power."

The Sum of Man by Norah Pollard

In autumn,
facing the end of his life,
he moved in with me.
We piled his belongings--
his army-issue boots, knife magazines,
Steely Dan tapes, his grinder, drill press,
sanders, belts and hacksaws--
in a heap all over the living room floor.
For two weeks he walked around the mess.

One night he stood looking down at it all
and said: "The sum total of my existence."
Emptiness in his voice.

Soon after, as if the sum total
needed to be expanded, he began to place
things around in the closets and spaces I'd
cleared for him, and when he'd finished
setting up his workshop in the cellar, he said,
"I should make as many knives as I can,"
and he began to work.

The months plowed on through a cold winter.
In the evenings, we'd share supper, some tale
of family, some laughs, perhaps a walk in the snow.
Then he'd nip back down into the cellar's keep
To saw and grind and polish,
creating his beautiful knives
until he grew too weak to work.
But still he'd slip down to stand at his workbench
and touch his woods
and run his hand over his lathe.

One night he came up from the cellar
and stood in the kitchen's warmth
and, shifting his weight
from one foot to the other, said,
"I love my workshop."
Then he went up to bed.

He's gone now.
It's spring. It's been raining for weeks.
I go down to his shop and stand in the dust
of ground steel and shavings of wood.
I think on how he'd speak of his dying, so
easily, offhandedly, as if it were
a coming anniversary or
an appointment with the moon.
I touch his leather apron, folded for all time,
and his glasses set upon his work gloves.
I take up an unfinished knife and test its heft,
and feel as well the heft of my grief for
this man, this brother I loved,
the whole of him so much greater
than the sum of his existence.


"The Sum of Man" by Norah Pollard, from Death & Rapture in the Animal Kingdom. (c) Antrim House, 2009.

Aww, that's too bad (or: One step foward, two... um, I forgot what I was saying because I'm really high right now.)

After the buzz wore off from the Obama administration's decision for the Justice Department to back up off a state for gettin' down, those damn Yankees go and thwart the will of the people. Or at least of pot smokers.

I've recently started getting these updates to keep up with all the different fronts of the War on the War on Drugs, or at least the war on pot, from theses guys at the Marijuana Policy Project. Now that things are truly, seemingly, in the hands of states, let's hope for a wave of different types of legalization/decriminalization to sweep the land. Okay, maybe not sweeping, that seems like a lot of work; maybe just, like, by osmosis...

Marijuana Policy Project Alert:

...New Hampshire legislature came just shy of voting to override Gov. John Lynch (D)'s veto of the state's proposed medical marijuana law. Two-thirds of the votes were needed. Although we cleared the House with 67.6% of the vote (240-115), it lost in the Senate, 14-10.

The bill had passed the legislature in June, by 232-108 in the House and 14-10 in the Senate. But on July 10, Gov. Lynch vetoed the bill, after refusing to meet with 15 patients and after failing to give input to the legislative conference committee, which amended the bill to address each of the eight concerns he had voiced in April.

...To override the veto and pass the bill into law, we needed supportive votes from two-thirds of voting members of the House and 16 votes in the Senate.

But the bill faced strong opposition from the state's attorney general and chiefs of police.

...71% of New Hampshire voters support allowing seriously and terminally ill patients to use and grow medical marijuana for personal use if their doctors recommend it, according to a 2008 Mason-Dixon poll.

The above is an infographic depicting the percentage breakdown of all crimes in the U.S. for last year. Any guess what's the #1 single most-arrestable offense? Gettin' mean with a little weed (or other drugs).

It seems the attorney general and the chief's of police wouldn't have much to do anymore if their were no drug users (mostly pot smokers) or sellers (who would vanish upon changing the laws) to bust. Do you know what it's like in winter up there? No, me neither, but for some reason The Shining comes to mind.

Though, if pot was legal, they could all just sit around and get stoned. Then, maybe there'd be less hunting accidents. Because there'd probably be a lot less hunting. And less drinking and fighting and car accidents and road rage and child abuse and spousal abuse and bullying and reduce a whole lot of the other crimes on the graphic--wait, why is pot smoking still illegal, still considered a bad thing?

Once was douche, but now he's found.

At least he knows how to give props when deserved.

The administration's recovery efforts [for hurricane Katrina] have drawn praise from Republicans, too, including Gov. Bobby Jindal. Jindal has credited Obama's team with bringing a more practical and flexible approach to the process. "There's a sense of momentum and a desire to get things done," he said in August.

So, it looks like he decided to play nice and except some help from the federal government, after all. I gave Bobby a hard time back when he gave us all a laugh at a dorky looking Indian-dude with a Louisiana accent and cheesy smile (see below) trying to out-pimp Obama, after the president's speech. Well, Bobby, I know how to give props too. Enjoy it, though, I doubt there'll be much more.

Columbus, what a prince.

"They...brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawk's bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... But they were well built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make the do whatever we want."

--from A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn

Charming.

The Odds on Obama (or: Things that creep me out)

Weren't very good, but then again he was as safe a bet as Bill Clinton. Regardless, both were better off than MJ or W, as well they should have been--if only because Obama would be hard-pressed to fuck up as royally as George Jr. But, that's also why it was a stupid move (in the words of some diplo-type "Absolutely stupid"--thanks M.) to give Barack the award: he hasn't really done anything yet, and the few things he has done aren't worth the approbation. And, perhaps not as importantly but more annoyingly, this is just the kind of thing the Right will use to support their horror that the world is sucking at the teat of Obama-nation.


Still, what's most disturbing about the whole affair is this creepy graphic The Economist used in their reaction piece about the award.


Heard George Packer (of The New Yorker) on the radio say Obama should not accept it (didn't know it was an option), that they should put it on hold, so to speak, until he has accomplished something. I completely agree.



Otherwise, I've mostly been creeped-out by science. Like the oncoming war of man versus machine ala Terminator. There's the singularity that Ray Kurzweil talks about, explained on this podcast from Future Tense, a weekly science/tech show. Basically, the rate of technological advance will increase so much that soon we'll be able to live indefinitely, if only virtually. But first computers are just going to get smarter than we are, hence the possible catastrophe. According to The Economist, it will be here soon.

"How soon before evolvable machines become cleverer than people? Little over a decade is the current consensus. One such machine has already been awarded a patent for something it quietly invented on its own."

Crap.



Alongside the computers outsmarting us, not only will medical technology increase, but we'll be incorporating computers into our biology, like some of us already (or soon will) have. Though for now technology only tacks on a few years, eventually it will allow us to live a really, really long time. Ready for that?

"'Very long lives are not the distant privilege of remote future generations -- very long lives are the probable destiny of most people alive now in developed countries,' Kaare Christensen of the Danish Aging Research Center wrote on Friday in a study in the Lancet medical journal.

Many governments in developed nations are already making moves toward raising the typical age of retirement to try to cope with aging populations."

What? As soon as people start living a little longer they talk about making us work more? Screw you Reuters.



"The researchers said this was an important strategy, and added that if part-time work was considered for more of the workforce, that could have yet more benefits.

"If people in their 60s and early 70s worked much more than they do nowadays, then most people could work fewer hours per week.... Preliminary evidence suggests that shortened working weeks over extended working lives might further contribute to increases in life expectancy and health."

Oh, okay, I like the sound of that. But still:

"'People younger than 85 years are living longer and, on the whole, are able to manage their daily activities for longer.'

But for people older than 85, the situation is less clear, the researchers said. Data are sparse, and there is widespread concern that exceptional longevity -- with ever larger numbers living to 100 and more -- could be grim for the people themselves and the societies they live in."

Crap.

"Keep in mind: I'm rich, I already have health insurance, and I don't care about other people."

Ah, Stephen Colbert. God bless his honesty. Check out his interview about health care reform. On the same episode watch the interview with Corey Booker, who is one of the stars of a Bravo documentary, Brick City, about Newark, the city of which he is the mayor. While you're at Colbert Nation, hear the new Flaming Lips album streaming live, and see them perform. After that, watch the interview with Wayne Coyne, the singer, in which Colbert accuses him of trying to "expand his mind" through the band's music. How dare they.


"Cut the president some slack," requests Obama. And though I completely agree about Kanye West--I hope he gets crabs--it's never a good sign when someone refers to themselves in the third person... this bloggist would never do that.

I was more afraid he was going to start swatting heads, "c'mon guys..." remember the last pest he dealt with in an interview.

Last week: 2752

It was at least a bracket on which to construct memory and, more so, a place of departure—perhaps the wrong way, like an elbow bent backwards. It became context: a way to delineate and map New York’s, and my, existence.

It’s my A.D. she said. Yeah, everything is before or after. After is when it all started to go bad.

Did you loose someone? No, luckily. Not that day, but soon enough. At the time, I thought I could have lost anyone, everyone. Or I was lost, and others were mourning the loss. For some, close enough to the epicenter, all those in the falls were our loss, and, too, something that had been collectively all of ours before was now lost with them. Physical proximity can in part explain this discarnate connection between strangers, those remained and those gone; the ripple effect that dissipates as it moves outward from point of origin.

For weeks the smoke, ill-defined, crawled slowly out of lower Manhattan; crossing the East River onto Brooklyn, hanging in the sky over apartment buildings, like mine. Enmeshed with the afternoon sun of that clear day, the amalgam of the smoke and ash of paper and plane and body went on to hue the sunset a beautiful, if unnatural, charcoal-red blood orange.




This was from the Writer’s Almanac last week.

D.H. Lawrence: 'Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.'

It was on this day in 2001 that two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City.

The first rule of Health Care Reform is you don't talk about Health Care Reform. (In honor of Teddy-bear Kennedy, R.I.P.)

The second rule of Health Care Reform is you DON'T TALK ABOUT HEALTH CARE REFORM!

No, I still will not talk about health care. But below is a surprisingly, from The Nation anyway, funny piece we all might enjoy in the current tumult.
















Your Questions About Health Care Reform Answered

by Christopher Hayes on 08/11/2009

Ok, so there's been a lot of misinformation about proposals to reform the health insurance industry and provide (near) universal coverage. Understandable! It's complicated stuff. Herewith, I'll try to answer some questions

1) Is it true that all of the bills currently proposed would end the practice of "rescission," whereby health insurance providers refuse to treat customers who've paid their premiums simply because they've become ill?

No! That's a common misunderstanding. Actually, all of the bills would ban incisions, that is, they would legally bar surgeons from performing surgery until a panel of twelve gay illegal immigrant government bureaucrats unanimously signed off on the procedure.

2) Is it true that health care reform would ban insurers from refusing to insure people because of pre-existing conditions?

Wrong again. To get rid of health inequality, the bills actually mandate that every American be given a pre-existing condition. A National Illness Commission, with academics appointed from Harvard, Reed College and Berkeley, will evaluate each citizen, and based on their demographic profile, choose their malady. Each disease or syndrome is scored on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most severe. White christian men will receive pre-existing conditions of 8 or higher. Black people, "wise latinas," and ACORN members will be exempted.

3) I heard the proposals currently under consideration provide seniors with option of free counseling sessions under Medicare, where they can discuss a living will and end-of-life care.

That's a huge misconception. The bills require all senior citizens (who are non union members) be euthanized on their 70th birthday. Under section 278(c)ii all last rites will be performed by Jeremiah Wright using a Q'uran.

4) I've heard the bills being proposed would require insurers to provide preventative care, like mammograms, free of charge.

No, but all lactating mothers will be forced to breast-feed poor children.

5) Will the current bills plug the "donut hole" in the Medicare prescription drug benefit so seniors don't have to pay exorbitant out of pocket expenses for their medication?

Absolutely not. The legislation will ban donuts.

Plenty of room at the Hotel...

Bed-Stuy, early last week.

I woke up depressed. Or rather I got depressed quickly. First, I hear/read that the past few days I’ve been without TV or internet I’d missed the abdication of the public option by the Obama Administration from health care reform. I’ll be honest, I can’t say the public option is the salve needed to start the process of good health care reform, but I haven’t heard compelling arguments against it either (meaning I’ve heard more for it).

Then, another Obama-related tidbit: 57% of Americans don’t think the stimulus has made any positive difference. The help shoring up state budget deficits across the country alone has softened the blow. With most of us living in these biggest, most populated states, like NY and CA, as you’ll see below, it would seem the statistic is backward. But no, just fucked up priorities.

Can’t help the government because the government shouldn’t help us, because government is bad, because it’s un-American. Un-American? Really? You might want to wipe that subsidized corn syrup off your mouth before you speak. Or at least pull up your pants after you’re done fucking the economy from Wall Street, while, between de-regulation and tax cuts of the past thirty years, the wealth you’ve accumulated at the expense of everyone else is still intact.

But actually these two groups can’t compromise the entire 57%. Besides a few other specific groups, the rest are working-class poor (mostly white, non-urban and Christian) who don’t know anything more than the mantras of God and Country they were taught in elementary school, now echoed in the right-wing talk radio and tabloid cable-TV “news” and, lest we forget, Hollywood-ified American history.

To meet a critique of the last mentioned medium more than halfway, I’ll use a rare example of good historic filmmaking I’ve seen recently. Though it might be unfair to call HBO Hollywood, they’re close cousins, the John Adams bio-drama was a fair representation of some of the intellectual and philosophical strains surrounding the Revolution, the founding documents and early administrations. Still, even just an introductory knowledge of the documents and the histories of the time are needed for the dialogue to be anything more than mere platitudes.

I don’t claim expertise, but I’ve at least read most the writings and histories of the events of the era. So, do me a favor, don’t tell me what an American is, and I won’t tell you either. Tell me something about health care reform, instead of shouting at me and then telling me it’s your American right to do so. Nowhere in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers does it mention being an asshole. But then again, its better to be shouted by a mob than to be tarred and feathered by one, as was shown in the Adams series. Wow, so I guess we really are making progress! Adams, Jefferson, and the boys would be proud. Now I feel better too.


Actually, the real reason I’m in a better mood is that a piece in The New Yorker (with the bonus of it coming a few days earlier than normal, which is later than it should be, normally, which is today) about the Golden State that just happened to align with a piece I’d started earlier this summer about California, it’s budget, drug law reformation, the right-wing, etc.—you’ll see below.

So, apparently, now that the state has now been deemed “ungovernable” (what the once said of NYC; that is, before Giuliani; though, that is a myth) a revolution is a brewing. As opposed to the comparably conservative notion I talk about below—pot legalization as a revenue generator—these guys are ready to trash the whole government. I love it! These MF’s are crazy.

I’ll say it now, if this happens I’m moving to California; if not to be a full on citizen, than just to watch it all go down. I was already thinking of moving there anyway if they did, or were about to, legalize pot. And though, yes, I like pot, this has more to do with the revolutionary nature of legalization and its implications for drug policy nationwide, worldwide.

But, damn, they’re talking about an actual revolution—not just a green one. The beauty is that, so far, it has wide ranging support across the political spectrum in the state. I always liked the phrase, if everyone agrees but none are happy, then it’s probably fair. I’ll add the corollary, even though it’s the inverse of the usual formulation, that, in this case, if everyone agrees it’s probably a good idea. Even The Economist is overturning this old platitude, but instead for the "cash-for-clunkers."

After all, any scheme that so many politicians agree on is almost bound to be a clunker itself. Yet given the difficult economic circumstances facing the world, the policy looks like a nice little runner.


California, one of the wealthiest places on the earth, with a multi-millionaire governor and billions in debt, had to send IOU’s to residents for their tax returns this year after the state’s inability to pass a new budget.

No question the system is broken," said liberal Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who recently decided not to run for governor next year and whose city is grappling with a $530 million deficit. "It's a state on the brink, families falling through the cracks with IOUs as a safety net. It's mind-boggling to me how little controversy there is over the IOUs."

Then Schwarzenegger held a large knife in a television address about the budget and it finally passed. Unsurprisingly, the balancing came by cutting services not increasing taxes. What got cut? The usual: schools, the elderly, state workers.

There are no new taxes. But hammer blows hit the poor, the elderly, the infirm and students and will keep them staggering for years.

Because California is one of only three states that require a two-thirds majority to approve a budget or even a tax increase, the small GOP minority had just enough votes to block passage. And entrenched gerrymandering makes their seats invulnerable, allowing them to take the most extreme positions. "For me it has been heartbreaking," said Democratic Assemblyman Kevin de Léon, one of ten conferees on the budget. "Back in February we came up with a good budget but with those two minor taxes--on oil and tobacco. That money would have gone right into education. But because of the two-thirds rule, and even though a majority wants it, we get handcuffed by a small group."

Over the past three decades, California has tripled the number of prisons it operates, has more than quintupled its prison population and has gone from spending $5 on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections to a virtual dead-heat in spending.

Perhaps, in the next logical step away from the War on Drugs, after legalizing “medical” marijuana (was in LA recently and saw pot stores advertising along with prescription writing doctors in local papers), the state will realize the cash crop they’re sitting on, and legalize pot completely.

Here are some excerpts from two great articles from The Nation. Most quotes above are from a more recent piece about the "ungovernable" state. The pieces below give a more than decent overview of the past and present failures of the War on Drugs, both nationally and in California.

For Betty Yee, chair of California's Board of Equalization--the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State--the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can't come soon enough. …Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21… Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. "Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?" she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger… announced that the state should at least consider the merits of pot legalization. He wasn't advocating it, he was careful to stress, but he did think the time was ripe to debate the issue.

Huh, what?!? Did say debate? Well, I’m sorry but that just sounds waaayyyyy too reasonable to me—I smell a rat!

"The budget is so bad now, the populism of the issue is beginning to work here in the Legislature," Ammiano says. [Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature.] "But there's a lot of policy wonks" supporting it. "There's very conservative support from the oddest sources and locations." The GOP chair in the state, as well as Tom Campbell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, have indicated their support for his bill, Ammiano declares. "When it starts to cost more money than it's worth even in the eyes of the pooh-bahs, then you can accomplish something."

Oh, right: the fiscal conservatives. Normally used to justify uninhibited financial gain, advance moral (read: crazy-Christian) agendas, or service Congressional rapacity; the more logical, fiscally responsible conservatism is coming to the surface. In large part, this is what is fracturing the Republican Party—to their credit, their benefit and ours.

The Right is finally waking up to the costs, monetary and philosophical, incurred after years of indulging their base: generally, white southern (east and west) and middle states who have co-opted conservatism to fit their xenophobic and Christian-based ideals; e.g., the abortion/execution paradox—love that one. Only, this definition of constituency is incomplete, leaving out generally more affluent whites of the northern part of the country and in urban centers.

These are libertarian folk who believe in states rights over federalism and the right to bear arms as a means of defense from an authoritarian government. Over time, this focus on civil liberties by the founders and the traditional brand of conservatism it spawned, including both fiscal and religious freedom, were split; the former joined the opposite of the latter: the desire to keep the government’s hand out of our pockets, taxation, was melded with the seemingly contradictory want to dictate people’s behavior morally, religiously.

This conservative-Christian alliance is something that’s always stuck in my craw (and, yes, I do have a craw). Conservatism shouldn’t have shit to do religion. If anything, the Right should be the most irreligious—the separation of church and state, anyone? Anyone? Buhller? Buhller? Yet, I can’t remember when the two haven’t been fused. Truly, this is puzzling.

One reason I can think of, according to Occam, would be that neither faction—the fiscally responsible (more in theory than practice, of late, seemingly only when it fits their politics—looked at the Iraq tab lately?) conservatives and the anti-poor (irony alert: most of them are working-class at best; What’s the Matter with Kansas explores this phenomenon), xenophobic bible-thumpers—have ever had even close to enough support individually to combat the wave post-WWII liberalism. But that’s just crazy, right?

Tough-on-crime rhetoric, and the policies and institutions that grow from it, emerged from Nixon's Silent Majority tactics, from his recasting of politics as a series of debates around "values" rather than bread-and-butter issues.

Oh, right. So maybe the usurpation of conservatism by the religious right mentioned above has it backwards, or at least only half right. Perhaps the traditional conservatives enveloped the Southerners, realizing that increasingly after WWII the numbers weren’t on their side. Between the radicalism and civil rights of the 60’s and affirmative action and de-industrialization of the 70’s, this country’s white-patriarchal tradition was existentially threatened—or so they thought.

In fact, recent Zogby polling commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency suggests that close to eight in ten Americans favor alternatives to incarceration for low-level nonviolent offenders. Another Zogby poll, from last fall, found that just more than three-quarters of Americans felt the "war on drugs" was a failure. The sea change in public opinion holds in California too. In late March the Los Angeles Times ran a column asking readers their opinion on marijuana legalization. So far 4,927 people have replied, and 94 percent of them favor legalization. A Field Poll in April found that 56 percent of Californians favor legalizing and taxing pot.

Checkmate. You guys loose—the drug thing anyway.

I will not talk about health care, I will not talk about health care, I will not...

The quotes below are from Media Matters, (yes, again) about the energy/cap-and-trade bill that passed a little while back. And though I’ve become aware that the main guy there at MM is of a somewhat dubious character, I still trust the quotes—I mean, if it’s easy enough to verify, why would they lie? That’s why I’ve like: though it’s no secret what side they’re on, they usually let the media’s stupidity speak for itself.

On Fox News, actor and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein described the president's plan as "the nerdy kids in high school who didn't have cars or had to take the bus to school or mothers had to drive them to school, they're taking revenge on the cool kids who had the cool cars."






Wait, Ben Stein? Isn’t he the branded-stereotype nerd of them all, since like the 80’s and Ferris Buhler’s Day Off? You know: Bueller, Bueller… Bueller?









Over on the Fox Business Network, Neil Cavuto likened the administration's plan to a fictional mob boss, saying, "It is not the American way, but it may be the Tony Soprano way."


Funny, I thought the Sopranos was based in New Jersey—god, if that’s Sicily, it has really let itself go. Kidding, I love Jersey. And though some might not like to be reminded of it, we can’t say that Tony Soprano isn’t as American as certain flavors of pies or sports games. Besides, what other country would a Don go to a shrink? Okay, perhaps Germany.

But, really, this is just another example of the American Dilemma—as in, there is no dilemma when there should be. We like to be proud of certain behavior and claim it as American, but we don’t own up to the stuff we deem bad; this goes for domestic and foreign policy. Bullshit, it’s all American. No, criminal enterprise is not uniquely American, but our brand is. One that is quite comfortable in the political and business worlds, among other things. Contradiction is okay; we can be good and bad, and not become schizophrenic.

Here’s another.

But it was MSNBC's Mike Barnicle who best illustrated what's wrong with the overwhelming majority of current economic punditry. On Wednesday, he asked his Morning Joe co-hosts incredulously, "What are they doing with the [stimulus] money?" Then on Thursday, he reflected on the detrimental nature of America's "amazingly impatient culture" where people can't stop asking, "Where's the money?" Simply put, this kind of schizophrenic analysis is still overwhelming logical thought, much to the detriment of the viewing public.

The Writer's Almanac, a daily antedote to existential crisis

I wrote recently about Hemingway. Below is a story about the author, summed up well by Garrison Keller's The Writer's Almanac, I'd been meaning to share. Added are a few other excerpts.


The Writer's Almanac for July 21, 2009

Hemingway said, 'The writer's job is to tell the truth.' In A Moveable Feast, he wrote: 'I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, `Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.'

There's a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to create a six-word story, and he said, 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' Inspired by this, an online magazine invited readers to submit their own six-word memoirs, a collection of which was published by Harper Collins in 2008 as Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Six-word memoirs include: 'All I ever wanted was more' and 'Moments of transcendence, intervals of yearning' and 'They called. I answered. Wrong number.'


Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head

"Advice to Young Poets" by Martín Espada, from The Republic of Poetry. (c) W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.


Here's part of another recent day's Almanac, from July 13, 2009

Hislop once said: 'Satire is the bringing to ridicule of vice, folly, and humbug. All the negatives imply a set of positives. Certainly in this country, you only go round saying, 'that's wrong, that's corrupt' if you have some feeling that it should be better than that. People say, 'You satirists attack everything.' Well, we don't, actually. That's the whole point.'


Money is such a treat.
It takes up so little space.
It takes no more ink
for the bank to print $9,998
than to print $1,001.
It flows, electronically;
it does not gather dust.
Like water, it (dis)solves everything.
Oceanic, it is yet as lucid
as a mountain pool; the depositor
can see clear to the sandy bottom.
It is ubiquitous and under pressure, yet
pennies don't drip from faucets.
Money is so tidy, so neat.
It is freedom in action: when you
give a twenty-buck bill to the cabbie,
you don't tell him how to spend it.
He can blow it on coke,
for all you care. All you care
about is your change. No wonder
the ex-Communists are dizzy. In
the old Soviet Union
there was nothing to buy,
nothing to spend. It was freedom
of a kind, but not our kind. We need
money, the dull electric thrill
when the automatic teller spits out
the disposable receipt.

"Money" by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems. (c) Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Farewell, Sweet Ditz

Palin’s out! Though I will miss her press conferences (see below)—more like a microphone and a few parkas, but hey.

"Let me state my reasons in plain English without any sports analogies: I'm resigning because I feel I can be a more effective leader operating from the sidelines. I'm no bench warmer," she added.

The above is from Robert Lanham, or FreeWilliamsburg fame, writing for the The Huffington Post.

Here’s her last day in office spent handing out hot-dogs. See? You just can’t makeup gems like that.

Still, it’s some of the best news in a while. I don’t think (hope to hell not) she’s leaving to parley into something else political. She’s kind of leaving her state hanging, even most. How is that helpful, as she puts it? Of course she blames the “media” for making her job impossible—like she didn’t give them more than enough ammo. Republicans aren’t being supportive. (Even they can smell blood in the water, perhaps. Scandal anyone? I think (hope) she’s leaving abruptly due to some close to being found out dirty secret. I say let her keep it, as long as she agrees to stay out of politics and the lower 49.




I haven’t read the whole thing, but this is supposed to be the complete Palin in one place.

Here’s another example of her douche-y-ness, from a little ways back.

Gov. Sarah Palin (R) announced last month that she would reject nearly half of the $930 million Alaska was to receive from the stimulus package on education, health care, and labor. But after calling the stimulus "an unsustainable, debt-ridden package of funds," Palin has now decided to accept the vast majority of the package…

Wait, one more douche-bag Republican who decided to do a little posturing before caving in on the stimulus. Don’t they think the flip-flop would cancel-out any bonus points from standing up to Obama?

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) also recently backed down from his standoff with the White House over his desire to reject stimulus funding.

Yes, that Mark Sanford. This was before the “went hiking the Appalachians” scandal. Douche.

What a Dick & Bogart's North Korean Blowout

I recently watched the infamous Nixon interview (Is it redundant to call something Nixon infamous?). Not the movie of the play based on the interview, but the original.

There’s no way Nixon could be a politician now. His speech, mannerisms, and sweaty odd-looking face would be enough to make people not vote for him—besides the crap that comes out of his mouth, not limited to the stuff Hitchens writes below.

I’ve heard it plenty before that even in his first loss to Kennedy in ‘60 was due to the discrepancy in their TV images, that Jack knew how to work it and Dick didn’t. But supposedly that must have been countered by the time he won two in a row. Whatever coaching they did, wouldn’t be enough today. The sweating thing especially: in old movies I’ve seen, there are these incredibly sweaty guys, sometimes the main character—think Carl Malden or Gene Hackman. Unless they’re in the jungle or playing sports (or having sex) stars don’t sweat, not naturally and thus uncontrolled. But just that face, too. That shit is old school.

---

Hitchens on Richard Nixon from his column at Slate.com:

The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon's mind was not "compartmentalized" between one issue and another. For example, like most "family values" Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court's finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.

As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don't seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. "What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up." To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism "in this country" is not located all that "deep down," since it's being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, "It may be they have a death wish. You know that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries."

---

Here's my impression and paraphrasing of Hitchens at a talk/interview he gave recently. I found the video at this pretty cool site: FORA.tv (thanks Allan).

(I know this poster is Chinese, but as close as I can get. Relax.)

Attempting, what he thinks an impossible task, to describe what life is like inside contemporary North Korea, Christopher Hitchens, after already likening the nation to that of George Orwell’s 1984, draws one contrast. While there is no mention of religion in the book, the state having taken the place of all things, the purported irreligious communistic country, North Korea, is, rather, similar to a particular western faith: Christianity. The president, the country’s founder, and his son, the current leader of the commi-esque party and the military, not president, are fused into one identity. Only, the president has been dead fifteen years. Hitchens quips, “It’s only one short of a trinity.”

Apparently, he's almost here. Won't that be a lot of fun. Actually, though, I feel better now that I know, like most heirs apparent of even anti-western countries, he was educated in liberal European schools. Sure, know your enemy. But now matter how careful and restrictive, they will encounter more people and things that counter the homegrown isolationist tendency.



Just look at what Europe did to Bogey.

Recess

Fuck it, I’m gonna open this thing up. I was reminded that if you’re going to bother to say it, then you might as well shout it. Shout it out loud. Okay, Kiss was the original, but I heard it said in relation to writing, recently—and it wasn't about coming out, either (although I suppose it would encompass that, too, but alas not here). And since I like to consider my self a poly-aesthete, then I’ll put my output where my mouth is—er, make that creativity, or something, where my mouth is.

Yeah, so, in this spirit, here’s a short story I wrote recently about a little boy who can’t sleep.

Recess

Ben’s tired, but not his brain. Head hums like the big, old computers at school, used only when newer, better ones weren’t working; the pushing, pulling spin of warm air through ancient-dust caked vents: cobwebbed dartboards forgotten in basements. Inside closed eyes glare TV screens. Eyes opened again. Better just to look into the dark. Spastic legs kick-off sheets, soon wrapped again, as Egyptian mummies. Ben saw a museum exhibit of a pharaoh in his tomb, hidden deep in a pyramid, surrounded by a lot of stuff. Food, water and even pets were buried in the tomb with the pharaoh. Why would he need these things when he’s dead? All is uncomfortable and nothing seems to work right.

Earlier, Ben escaped from recess. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go outside with the rest of the kids. It was just—well, his stomach hurt. He hadn’t felt like eating breakfast or much lunch. What he was able to shove down was barely warm and unrecognizable. Just before the end of lunch, he went to the bathroom. When he was done, instead of making a left and going back to the cafeteria, he took a right, and walked towards the double-doors at the end of the hall—flat, cold black cheeks below a pair of thin glass eyes crisscrossed with wire, each a lower eyelid: sets of curved, hanging arms holding dull metal bars. Above the doorway a light-box never lit read “Emergency Exit Only, Alarm Will Sound.” Ben had never heard it go off before. He opened one of the doors, waited a couple of seconds, and walked out onto the loading dock behind the cafeteria. Ben could hear the school janitor talking on the other side of the big garbage cans.

Ben likes the janitor. He has a small hoop earring in each ear, a jerry-curl and cool tattoos. The janitor, or School Superintendent, like it’s painted on the parking space filled by his sparkly-blue van, is the coolest adult at school. He gets to wear a uniform with his name on it: “Mean” Joe Green. That’s what all the kids call him, and, just like the jolly-green giant, he towers over them.

The janitor was talking to one of the lunch-ladies about things Ben was used to hearing grownups talk about: their jobs, their kids, and money. But he was cussing, too, which Ben wasn’t used to hearing from adults, at least not in real life—they cussed all the time on cable. “Mean” Joe was talking about a “big mess” that “poor folk” had to “clean up.” What big mess? Was the janitor poor? Ben heard him say Wall Street. Wasn’t that where his dad works? Recently, Ben’s dad had been picking him up from school, something his mom had usually done. He thought he heard the lunch-lady say, “stalks.” Like beanstalks? Hopefully they were having beans for lunch tomorrow. No, she said “stocks,” like socks. Ben didn’t know what stocks were, but they sounded familiar too. His heart beat loudly in his ears. The janitor wasn’t being nice at all. Sick and hungry at the same time, his stomach still hurt. Making sure the door didn’t slam shut behind him, Ben went back inside. He ran down the hallway towards the playground, the blacktop, and recess.

A week late, but who's counting?

July 4th 2009. Louis Armstrong on the radio. It’s his birthday too.

Reading The Great Gatsby, again. Jonathan Franzen on NPR says he revisits the book every year or two. I’ve always leaned toward This Side of Paradise, though Gatsby is possibly, as the people on the radio had been proposing, the American Novel. More true lately, with the rise and fall of big things. The stock market, gangsters, bond-traders, “self-made” people, indulgence, arrogance, and tragedy shared, or not.

A good story tendrilled to today, Gatsby props up American myths to stand or fall against the winds of human frailty and liability. The land of opportunity; to do what? Somewhere to re-invent yourself, start over. That’s kind of what Agniezska, my friend, recently-citizened, whose validity I gladly vouched for to the proper authorities, said. Besides the, perhaps, more common conflation of “opportunity” and money-making, she says, to leave all you’ve known and what’s been expected of you can too be a compelling a reason to come to America.

I’ve decided to stay put today. I’m staying on the block. Not as much action as I would expect, but it’s still early. 1:52 pm.

A Louis classic is playing, a slower romantic one. He’s singing something about giving him your lips. “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” that’s the Armstrong title.

On the corner of Gates and Marcy, the next cross street up from here at Monroe, stands the Louis Armstrong Public Houses. I wonder if anyone over there is listening to this sweet, indulgent daylong-plus retrospective of the erstwhile jazzman. It’s one of the least attractive, though they’re still common, places I’ve seen in Bed-Stuy; at least that’s within spitting distance of my place and sometimes crossed in normal route.

Firecrackers and some small fireworks have been going off for days. Today there are more, gladly. Just a bit rebellion, and not just for the metaphor of artillery, fireworks that fit well with the underlying ethos of the day: don’t tell us what to do. A silly law easily broken, a way to, more than just let off work-a-day-steam by indulging in ritual, convenient and relatively safe. We need this. For America, born of rebellious teenage-logic—like, the battle of attrition—law breaking for the sake of it, anti-authoritarianism just because, is part of its creation myth.

Triangulated by a milk-mouthed jazz radio voice, car stereos throbbing whoomps, and the tinny jangle of tiny speakers in windows turned street-ward, I woke up from a nap. Then a new theme is introduced: the ice cream man’s Scottish-jig-something-or-other-ditty playing on and on, and forever; just beneath, an aftertaste of subtle but substantial lawnmower-roar of the truck’s refrigeration.

Black Power-fists exchanged for Barack Obama portraiture on t-shirts, the now iconic image made by a white man of a man half-white. Beneath the shirt still angry, but anger more stilled, more patient and, perhaps, more optimistic; perhaps there’s more reason to be.

Fountains of silver and orange fill front steps of brownstones, whistle-crack. Night has come. Whistle-boom. The sun has gone. Whistle-crackle-fizzle. Darkness only broken up occasionally by—crash, like metal doors thrown off rooftops onto sidewalks below.

Thunder? Or the low rumble of far dark sky disturbed. Pop, pop: go the smaller firecrackers kids get to set off.

Momentary anarchy. Insurgent ritual. Rebellion distilled.


Yes, that's an Hassidic cop.