Fresh Coffee

Nepenthe

2008-08-29T11:15:00.000-07:00

Sitting among the crows and hawks,

we drink our after-lunch coffee.

She says that I'm more the poet than she,

and looks at me blankly.

As she objects that her eyes are behind shaded glasses,

that the blankness in my own mind,

I listen.

I study the notion for a while and look out on the ocean fog

rolling in beneath a craggy hilltop.

I am slowly learning a new language.

Soon we will be covered in a mist as we negotiate

a steep coastal road.

It is hot, and well must still get a pie to bring with us.

Shreveport's Forum Prints Ridiculous Opinions about Obama

2008-04-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

In response to Louis Avellone's recent article on Barack Obama, et. al., in the Forum, let me say this: He gets just about everything wrong, as usual. The recent article makes the ridiculous claim that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were supporters of religion. Avellone, no doubt, already knows that both men were non-sectarian deists who followed no religion at all, and that both men were critical of what they believed to be irrational claims made by the faithful of there own time (Thomas Jefferson once famously produced a redacted version of the New Testement in which he took out passages relating to the miraculous and supernatural elements.), yet Avellone sees fit to smear both of these venerable Americans with the taint of religion.

Shameless as the above example is, at least these men are dead and run no risk of ever having to read this drivel; however, not content to malign the dead, Avellone saves most of his weird negativity for the current Democrat presidential front runner, Barack Obama. And he continues to harp on the unbelievably silly issue of a lapel flag pin.

Why does Avellone insist on saying things like, "remember Obama still refuses to wear a flag lapel pin"? There is here, of course, a meaning implicit in the selection of the words. For example, why "Refuses"? Here is the implication that a person is obliged to have a wearable flag on his person (at least in camera range), or he is unfit to hold the office of President. This belief is so obviously not true that even Avellone doesn't bother to try to support it. He just mentions it over and over again, which is an old rhetorical trick that saves one the bother of having to make sense. In this way the cognitive process is bypassed and in its place is merely the politics of images and slogans, which happens to also be everything that is currently wrong with this country's political environment.

It is probably true that a small number of marginalized, ignorant people will believe that things like a candidates lapel pin or his personal religious beliefs should be considered when casting one's ballot, but for most of us, it's just further proof that Obama's detractors have so little in way of substantive criticism—If for no other reason than this, Louis Avellone's recent Forum article is a hopeful one for Obama supporters.

Upon Contemplating Solzhenitsyn

2008-04-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

We were lost when we came to find ourselves,

unaware that we had been arrested—

On the Gulag floor ‘mist lice and ill-health,

We were blank men, torpid, vile, dejected;

Dying ones there told us what’s expected.

We had not heard the knock upon the door,

nor the clinking sound of gates erected,

and no one knew what he was taken for,

Nor why boots pushed his teeth into the floor.

The man who tortured me sold real estate,

in civilian life, a father of four.

Our heads but not our minds upon a plate;

They chopped our hair with rusty garden sheers;

Post-Saddam, these were American years.

Response to "Scandal in the Media."

2008-03-21T10:06:00.001-07:00

I know that the point Louis Avallone was trying to make in his March 19 Forum article, "Scandal and the Media,"LINK was that the media establishment gives a "pass" to sexual deviants who are Democrats and rides Republican ones out of town on a rail. That this is his point is made clear by his statement of this very proposition, but not in any way by the evidence he offered to support it, much of which is based on casual conclusions and, in at least one notable case, a falsehood. A close look at this article’s false claim, I think, reflects also the irrational divisions that have come to define much of our current political environment.

Mr. Avellone is upset that several news programs covered the Eliot Stitzer scandal without making clear that he was a Democrat. He points out that several congress people who were touched by scandal were clearly labeled Republican. This, incidentally, is an much-discussed and, to my mind, meaningless issue that is currently being warmed over in the "conservative" blog world. I suppose I would be more likely to look to my past experiences as a television watcher and remind myself that, in my experience, the news usually does not attribute party affiliation to Governors, yet almost always does to Congress people. At any rate, he gives a list of Democrats that have been involved in scandals, and it is here that he leaves the world of opinion and enters the land of libel.

Mr. Avellone brings up the case of Congressman Barney Frank, and says that Frank had ". . . permitted the operation of a homosexual prostitution ring in his home in 1989." This is an admittedly excellent example that might serve to shows a relative difference in treatment between Democrats and Republicans involved in sexual scandal (Frank is, after all, still in Congress). This is such a compelling example in fact that one is almost tempted to overlook the fact that it is untrue.

Though there were allegations that he had done so, Frank, who fully cooperated with them, was cleared by the Congressional Ethics Committee in 1990 of any such knowledge that his premises were used for any improper activity. He was however reprimanded for fixing a friend’s parking tickets and for trying to influence the parole status of the same friend, the only pieces of incriminating evidence to come out of the investigation.

This particular libel is an old one, but it has recently been revived in the service of partisan political attacks, another rusty weapon that must be used because it is there. Media Matters has documented the following two cases that relate to this issue: In August of 2007, Pat Buchanan, a conservative journalist and former Presidential candidate, made the statement that Frank, "had a fellow running a—basically a full-service whorehouse in his basement." It is interesting, and not altogether un- instructive, to note that this statement was in reaction to more contemporary Congressional sex scandals, of which the case of Congressman Larry Craig was then the latest example. Craig had just recently (strangely) pled guilty to soliciting a policeman for sex in a public bathroom. He later said that in spite of this he was innocent of the charge. (Congressman Craig had incidentally been one of three members of the House Ethics Committee who had pushed for the harshest of punishments for Barney Frank in 1990.)

The second example of this calumny is to be found in a recent edition of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. On March 12, 2008, in reaction to the Eliot Spitzer scandal, virtually the same comment was made as crude satire by a Bill Clinton impersonator who, while jokingly extolling the tolerance of the Democratic Party, said, "You can be a prostitute . . . or like Barney Frank, let a prostitution ring be run out of your home." So, the point is, by the time Mr. Avellone’s article was published in the Forum, this particular bit of nonsense had made its way into the blogosphere, or semiosphere, or whatever sphere it is where people who don’t won’t to be bothered with things like facts and details go to find out what to talk about.

As is often the case, it is perhaps more important to examine why people are saying something rather than what they are saying. I’m just guessing here but I think this is yet another example of the general culture of opposition. I honestly don’t think any of Mr. Avellone’s details show much of a double standard; I think his argument and the article itself merely show how reactive our political environment has become.

At the heart of this reactive environment is a binary and Manichean view of the world. The idea that there are two equal and opposite worldviews, one Democrat and one Republican, is now so firmly wedged into our cultural narrative that it has become a conditioned reflex for people to just attack each other, and no one seems to care whether or not what he or she says is even true. It is a perspective that is reinforced by such trite phrases as "both sides of the isle." Moreover, it has the effect of encouraging people to see the world through a distorted lens where everything is an endless cycle of reaction, and where any criticism of my side must necessarily be "balanced" with an equal or greater criticism of your side.

This is the situation we find ourselves in, in 2008. Although many of us who think this is a counterproductive and obscure way of looking at the world, it appears, at least, to be the dominant view in the media, if Mr. Avellone’s article is any example.

A James Joyce Scat

2008-02-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

No greater love hath a man that he lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Then it came to pass that they crossed the Ozarks to reach the land of milk and money, and there he purchased a hamburger, of which his goodly wife would have to understand, for the tavern-master would not otherwise allow him to watch the game, and there saw he the very Saints themselves beaten into the ground by Giants, so severe were these Giants that they full sore oppressed each challenger with mighty dispatch and were destined to reach the bowl after which they quested.

This be no benefit to Sir Traveler who was of the throwback cloth and, unlike others of his order, had a true faith in the intercession of saints. For relief he and one of his kind were beguiled by blasphemous parchments that could only be acquired on the Internet, at a cost of 100 per diem.

They too quested after the bowl and took faith that even Jesu knew not the day or the hour. And they tacked messages upon the doors of the church to give comfort to them who were also given to the faith of saints. “Be it next year,” saith they.

Aphorism #1

2007-09-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

One proposition proved true by Jesus and Socrates is that people who rigidly adhere to moral precepts are much like those people who always drive the speed limit. They disrupt the flow of traffic and everyone hates them.

Dream of Sept. 15, 2007

2007-09-16T08:59:00.000-07:00

This evening I had what was among the most vivid dreams I have ever had. Had it been a film I might have said the director was mad. First, I was an insurance salesman who was walking off, jogging off, to get breakfast for a client. I was in a city unfamiliar to me, but my dream self, Dream Me, knew it quite well. (Note: I am now remembering that I had left my house also because the Golden Girls sans Sophia were getting naked there).

My client was an old woman whom I knew to be senile; she wanted only Cap'n Crunch cereal. I found a smarmy waiter in an out-of-doors cafe who took the order but required, before hand, a tip/bribe of five dollars; I had only one ten, a one, and (strangely enough) a three dollar bill. I did not want to give him the ten on principle—Dream Me doesn't need the money.

After getting change, I gave him five, but then a major shift (plot twist?) occurred and I was unable to receive the order—famished client will no doubt haunt me in my next dream!—I was thrown into a wormhole which brought me to a strange land (My dream self was at such a loss) which was being torn apart by unknown forces.

I found a method of escape back to Broadmoore by floating on red bricks. This was the only way out of the devastation. A race of industrious lizard people who were indigenous to the area had created this expensive method of escape for the unexplained many who had found themselves in this strange land. These bricks were a prized commodity among the natives who depended on transportation charges for their existence. (Had they also brought us here?)

So expensive were these bricks that bipedal creatures were sold only two, on which they were expected to stand for a period that I was given to believe would be some months' time. I tried to explain to the creatures that I and my friends, for by now I was representing a number of other humans who had found themselves in this odd situation, were not of a species that could be expected to stand for such a long time, and would, therefore, require additional bricks.

I argued before the appeals tribunal of lizard magistrates, who were tan and green (my thesis committee?). I prepared a brilliant ad hoc case, or so I believed. while wobbling badly on two bricks, I presented my argument. I argued through algebra and prime numbers (such is the brilliant logician that is Dream Me) that the moral precepts represented in the Principle of Universality demanded we be given better accommodations. Fairness and equality of condition after all demanded it.

The tribunal was unimpressed. It did not appear to them that the humans were at all equal in any respect, so unlike the beautiful, streamlined lizard genus of their home world. "Of course, that is why we need better accommodation." I was reaching. "Since we are unlike, we need to accommodate the mean"—whatever that meant! This, however, impressed them as being very reasonable and we immediately received a yacht of red bricks. And in this manner we began the long journey home.

###

I Got a New Chair Today.

2007-08-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

When I got to work today, there was a new chair at my desk. I had been wanting a new one as the old one was at least 3 ½ years old, and like most of the furnishings and equipment in my classroom, I had inherited it from my predecessor. Today is also the day we were expecting a visit from the corporate office's director of curriculum. We are a lonely outpost seldom visited by anyone from those distant parts. Even before I had sat down in the chair and fingered its firm cushions and luxuriant newness, I remembered the film Stalag 17, how the Germans had given new blankets to the prisoners-of-war only to take them away after the visiting Red Cross officials had left. I sat down and leaned back. There was not the creaking sound that I had become accustomed to, the one that would always disturb the rare silence that would fall over the crowded room during a testing session.

2007-08-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

It occurred to Cassie on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.

So Cassie walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cassie, this is important.” Opening the letter she found the following words It's about time you looked there. You always take so long to do things. Your father was like that. Please be more observant in the future.

For a while, Cassie sat down in a kind of strange trance. Whatever would have motivated her long-dead mother to have such an odd message on the back of that picture all those years ago? She strained to remember something that would have explained it. Seeing there was no date on the yellowing paper, she sat stunned. Then she laughed. Cruel joke, she thought. The old bitch playing mind games with me beyond the grave. She no doubt had put it there. . . yes, she placed it there to be . . . a cruel joke! She did not just send me a letter; that's not possible, so it must be that it was her senility, a product of her senility—made her a mean bitch at the end, though in truth mother and daughter were close.

Of course, any alternative explanation, one that might involve time machines, navigable multi-verses, worm holes—Einstein on the other end puffing away at his pipe; bad science fiction, all of it!—would have been rejected before even being entertained. Science fiction was fine when it kept to its metaphoric functions; it was ridiculous when it called attention to its otherness, sensational stories meant to excite the middle brow fan. It was a sad comment on society. Astronomy had divorced astrology some centuries before, but in within the pages and plasma screens of the modern entertainment landscape, science had not yet (or again) detached from its fictions. Two thousand years of slouching ignorance: I believe it 'because' it is absurd—I believe it is a poem, Father.

When will I go home again? Cassie's grandfather had asked. She was a girl, and he was in a hospital bed. --Soon, she assured him as he watched the magic lantern show on the wall. Said he saw a man skiing down the plaster and made a passing comment. The next time she saw him he was in another room and everyone was sad and so was she. And for the first time she felt hopeless. At the house, she went into granddad's room and out the window saw sunlight shinning on a pine tree. It was a warm early-summer day. She smelled his stale tobacco in the air and knew that magic would never touch her life again.

Attack on Al Gore's Assault on Reason

2007-07-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

I was recently scanning the internet for entries on Al Gore's book, Assault on Reason, and was surprised to see so many people criticize the book before they had actually read it. Some of these people did not plan on reading it at all but offered some strong opinions. For example, Robert Tracinski on a site called Real Clear Politics said, “Based on excerpts of Gore's book published in TIME, his not-so-subtle theme is that reason is being "assaulted" by a free and unfettered debate in the media. . .” Actually his argument centers around his thesis that there is not a free and unfettered debate in the media, though a person is free to disagree with this thesis and the reasoning that leads to it.

Josh Hammond on the site Best of the Blogs stated, “If you thought Al Gore was arrogant, condescending, and a know-it-all before (none who read these entries probably do), then Al removes all doubt in his latest broadside on the Bush administration.” And he adds although he has not read the book that,

“Maureen Dowd gets it right when she calls Gore’s book a “high-minded scold”. Gore’s primary “research” is selective newspaper articles, selective Congressional testimony, selective commission reports. . .”

He says that because of all this he doesn't intend on reading it at all, “because the last thing I need is a condescending politician lecturing me about how life is. . . I have read a variety of book reviews about the book and that is good enough for me.” Yet I would push the question: why do you blog about a book you have not even read? Or if you do, why charge with confidence that he has used “selective quotes,” etc., when your sources are themselves merely a selection of book reviews? One can simply not be unaware that using substandard rhetoric to attack a book with the title “Assault on Reason,” will leave one open to the charge of being ironic.

Personally I have so far read the majority of the book and can say, based on that portion, I didn’t find the book at all “arrogant” or “condescending.” I was surprised that it was as balanced and reasonable as it was; I was really expecting a partisan polemic. What I found in its pages was a largely detached, critical examination of contemporary communications theory.

One of the things he writes about here is exactly the nature of the some of the criticism this book is getting: the person who writes it is scrutinized while the “ideas” within the book are marginalized by selective quotation, omission, or pre-judged sentiment. The book does lack eloquence at times. It does have an agenda. There is much Gore's book that is not new, but it does seem to try to present information an honestly way and to lead the reader with logic more than bluster, or clever verbal jabs. It's a good read.

Smarter than a 5th Grader

2007-07-18T17:55:00.001-07:00

Living from one break bell to another

The teacher writes a lagging rhyme upon

Yet another student’s pleasant failure:

“Let failure upon failure be our bond”;

‘Till longed for 3 PM has come and gone,

Then if the lagging poem be thrown away—

And to toss the scrapes one is often fond,

Will yield an unacceptable delay;

For the life is short and the work day, long;

The hallow’d ring around the temple grays;

The papers are counted, ink is measured;

American life leaves no time for play—

Efficiency makes our bombs work better.

structured Sentences will soon be given

Useless teachers by judicious villans.

Because I Do Not Turn. . .

2007-07-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

It occurred to Cecilia on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.
So Cecilia walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cecie, this is important.”

MY DAY IN TRAFFIC COURT:

2007-07-03T06:26:00.000-07:00

My appearance in traffic court today began with an encounter with two underlings who seemed to share one brain. Left hemisphere was handing out papers for us violators to sign with information about our right to an attorney. I thought I must be in the wrong place because one doesn't usually get an attorney for traffic court, so as the people were grabbing pens and so on, I started to ask Lefty if maybe I was in the wrong place.Excuse me but — "Wait!" She pointed an erect finger at me.After she handed out pens and paper, it was my turn. It's just that I'm here for a traffic ticket. . . "Yea?" Well, it says that I've been informed about my right to have an attorney; I don't really understand. . . "Hold on," again with the excited finger. She indicated a bench for me to sit on. I sat on it. after a few minutes, I was called over by the sister sphere.

Sister told me that I could get an attorney but I had to sign the paper . . . Well what I was concerned about. . . "Just a minute," she was terse. "It's our policy for you to sign now. You can make arrangements for a lawyer . . ." I must have looked like I was about to say something, "Let me finish!" I didn't say anything. "You have to go ahead and sign it now." I told her that she must be used to speaking to very angry people. "It's our policy," she responded.

I told her I had no problem signing the paper, but If the court was going to appoint an attorney for me, then I was going to wait to be represented. She seemed to relax only after I signed the paper. By the way, to say 'it's just our policy' is the last refuge of the moron, I wanted to say. The prosecutor called me over after a while and I spoke with her. She was a nice young woman whom I had actually known some years ago. I explained my confusion. She said that,that clause should not have been on that paper. I pleaded "no contest with a statement." Then I sat down and wrote some haikus.

What follows is the statement and some of the haikus:

Haiku #1

Stood in a poor line

Bureaucratic snaps conveyed

my message poorly.

Haiku #2

Made to sit and wait

This month the money is gone

Can't pay Sallie Mae.

Haiku #3 "On recognizing Old Friends in the Court Room."

I've known her for years

once we watched the sun come up

she thought I forgot.

Haiku #4: "Upon Rising."

Next to an ex-con

sincerely made my statement

Portly judge listened.

...My Statement:

"First, I have no hard feelings against the policeman who ticketed me; he was as nice as a person who tickets you can be.

Judge, in a municipality that was half-way enlightened, the need for revenue would generate progressive taxes that would be both share and predictable. As it is, penalties levied against citizens in the form of traffic fines represent on of the most regressive forms of indirect taxation imaginable. These have the effect of penalizing the poor in our community dis proportionally. A person of limited means can expect to pay 100 percent of his traffic fine in necessary funds, not discretionary. (In my case, my student loans may be late this month.) It is the regressive nature that makes the proliferation of traffic and speeding tickets in the way that they are proportioned, the amount of the penalty, and the impact that they have on poor families, regressive, and, in my opinion, immoral. Having said this, I leave it to your honor."

in progress.

2007-06-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

There are those aphorisms which are entertained by people with such regularity that their truths are often assumed to be absolute; for instance, the well-known expressions that an old dog cannot be taught a new trick, that a single bird in one’s possession should be valued above multiple fowl in a bush, and that the buoyancy of cream will assure its rise to the top, by displacement of the crap beneath it. But perhaps the most troublesome of all idioms is the one that instructs a person that there is no value to be gained in judging a book by its cover—a thinking person will certainly know that quite the contrary is often the case: there is, In fact, much to be learned by looking at things such as a book’s overall condition, its marginal notes, and the objects its readers have left inside of it.

Those who write in the margins make a sort of contribution to the text. It is clear that whatever one contributes in this way is limited. It is added not to an edition, but to a single copy. In view of its limited readership, one may ask what the point is to all this. Of course over time ancient marginal notes have been known to enter into later copies of a text. This was especially true before the advent to mass printing. Sometimes these additions are blended so completely that they appear to have been part of the original text itself. It is then left to later readers to uncover them as elements of addition. For example, when Erasmus consulted the oldest of the then existing sources, he came to the understanding that the phrase, “father, son, and holy ghost,” was not in the original text of the Book of John. That is, its presence in that book antedated the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, where early Christians hammered out the Trinitarian model out in an attempt to reconcile their belief in Christ’s divinity and their belief in monotheism. This was, by the way, an issue over which early Christians slaughtered and persecuted each other in droves before arriving at a consensus. There are of course other examples of influential marginalia, but its lasting value is perhaps its exclusivity.

In this way I write to a person who will not respond and who may now be long dead. This is a one-way correspondence that I maintain with the man who wrote these original side comments, some 43 years ago. Perhaps in some years’ time another person will come along and answer mine. But what does all this scribbling add to a book? These layers of thought, over time, are imbued with their own tone and take on something like their own life: one intimate reader communicates with another: two people who for a time loved the same book (the very same) reach out to each other over the years, the centuries and share an insightful comment or rude pun. I for one find this incredibly charming. Such is the beauty of marginalia, an art which is now all but lost, though its spirit may live on in the form of internet message boards, as well as in the prose of the public restroom wall.

But as revealing as marginalia is, it may be that the objects that one leaves in a book can perhaps be just as interesting. What people leave to mark their places in a book can vary from church flyers and newspaper clippings to bills and doctors’ orders.

A Syruppy Savior

2007-06-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

She waitressed by where the pies are fingered,
then stopped and looked upon a greasy wall,
in the midst of noon-day clatter, lingered.
Remembering a dry Homecoming fall

'I was young, 'she thought; 'I was young . . . and all.'
Within the goop she saw the face of Christ,
the holy lord, next to the bathroom stall.
Others saw it, but Leigh denied it thrice:
"Oh yea, more work for me, that's really nice!"

Then cripples were healed by the stock room door.
With cheerful scowls she cut them all a slice.
The poor felt loved and wept upon the floor.
Church folk came in droves; ne'er found a place to sit;
'Great', she thought. 'Church folk never tip for shit.'

2007-06-08T06:49:00.001-07:00

DIRTY BOOTS

In the distance a zepplin floated above the London sky. It carried several bombs that would after a fashion drop like eggs from its belly to deliver terror, and a few deaths, to the sleeping city. The nighttime attacks were becoming a nuisance to the British, a public relations nightmare, but little more. But as of yet the search lights had not caught sight of it. Presently, a single, seeking beam panned the sky.

Bellow, Baggett felt he was being watched. From the museum down to the the old Chelsea slum, he felt that he was being oppressed by some unknown gaze. That the gaze was scanning him, putting him into categories, was inescapable. That it was so stealthy as to avoid his cone of sight, so nimble as to make no sound, so crafty that he felt, himself, a target, was unthinkable. But yet, several times he had quickly turned around expecting to, bracing himself for,—a foe? This was indeed bad business; he would tell the Chinaman in the morning, he decided . . . in the morning, after this one last time. He was too important for this kind of errand. The thought of it made him ill. He approached the building and began to climb the staircase. He saw a cat eating a rodent on the steps, and he pulled a small rock out of his pocket and threw it at the tom. Two other cats whom he had not seen darted from under the stairwell and flew off in opposite directions, but the original tom was unaffected. He feasted hungrily upon the kill. Baggett reached back into his pocket for a bigger rock.

Up above, the lighted beam continuing to probe the night hit finally upon a target, the German Navy Zepplin L-35. Two additional beams quickly transfixed themselves to the ship and after a few moments flares began to follow their trajectory toward the hulking German blimp.

With apparent indifference the cat continued eat. He was the color of earth. Baggett's second rock was ignored, though is it was close to hitting the animal's head. Baggett pulled out his very large revolver and aimed it at the recalcitrant cat. Baggett closed one eye, twisted up his face; but at the very last moment he decided against the noise this tactic would generate. Just then the first of the explosions blasted through the London night, and he felt no longer any compunction to use his weapon. He aimed the gun at Mister Boots.

The dimise of the public intellectual.

2007-04-22T09:34:00.001-07:00

Who now writes for the educated reader? Twenty years ago Russell Jacoby asked this question and warned of the dangers of the the missing generation of intellectuals who had influence in the public mind. The fact that in 1987 there seemed to be an absence of public intellectuals, compared to the previous century or so, inspired him to write The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. Jacoby noticed that by the late 1980s a new generation (the youth of the 60s) had not penetrated the public mind in the way that Vidal, Mailer, and others had in the late forties and early fifties, and he tried to find out why. Now, twenty years later, while Vidal and Mailer—perhaps the last of the breed—continue to be recycled and we are seeing an interesting trend and a new answer to the question posed 20 years ago by Jacoby.

But in 1987 the atmosphere was a bit different. Jacoby believed that the sixties, youth had been co-opted by academia, whose structural conditions had the effect of modifying the content of their output in such a way that it was of little interest to the general public: those who had once written for the educated public, were now writing for fellow academicians; by changing the target audience, the power of the new generation of intellectuals to affect the public mind was reduced.

I would argue also that its substance was now left to be filtered though the lens of the polemicists who had, by the early 1990s, replaced them in the public sphere—more about this in a moment.

As in the physics of a closed system, heat is drawn from the thing . . . the energy they devoted to the radical causes of the 1960s was transferred to the university system.

While he did not totally discount the contribution of journalists et. al., he believed that content, too, was modified by the institutional presence of "deadlines, space, [and] money" (Jacoby 13) seemed to alter any meaningful contributions they might produce. In references to Noam Chomsky's "Propaganda Model," one might also add the modifying effect of the advertisers in a private media setting. All of this served to change the public discourse and to make the environment less friendly to the public intellectual.

Twenty years later, the question is again asked, who now writes for the educated reader? Not surprisingly it is the person who communicates primarily through electronic means, who does not require his audience to read at all; he is a radio star, a television "talking head." It is this entity that has taken the place in public debates that was once the pervue of the public intellectual.

Flag Desecration

2007-04-01T12:07:00.001-07:00

This is illegal:

Executive Order. US Code Section 7(b) "The flag should not be draped over the hood, top, sides, or back of a vehicle or of a railroad train or a boat. When the flag is displayed on a motorcar, the staff shall be fixed firmly to the chassis or clamped to the right fender." 4USC7
AND. . .
i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. . . .(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform." 4USC8

. . .One may sign it, salute it, or burn it; but it may be that the only difference is what is in his mind.

The defender of the Home Land:

West Virginia Children forced to salute with a "stiff" arm. This case went to the Supreme Court in 1942:

"Retiring" an American flag:

The whole issue is a double standard, and what people want to outlaw is what is in the mind of the person who does it. That's what makes the anti-flagburning position all the more indefensible. Most criminals are defined by their actions; the "flag burner" who is the target of ant-flag burning legislation, is defined by what he thinks.

On Bossier City Police and the Thugs of the Cosa Nostra

2007-03-23T16:17:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about Charlie Chan lately. He was my first favorite fictional character. I am a great fan of the old Chan movies. Played by several actors over two decades, this character was best portrayed, in my opinion, by the Swedish actor Warner Oland throughout most of the 1930s. A wise polymath, Chan would interact with the public with a modest respect. Before making a point of order, he would invariably begin with the polite interjection, "Excuse, please—but...." What followed was a hard-hitting, logical, and necessary point. Chan did not waste words.

Yesterday one of my students, a pregnant woman in her twenties, was visited by a Bossier City, La. Police detective named Thomerson. The highlights: She was met in the main (public) reception area by a man of Asian decent who wore a badge and gun. I, and several others, were present in the area. She was told that she was not under arrest, but that she was to come with him to another jurisdiction to answer questions. She was not under arrest, but, he insisted, she had little choice but to come with him. She politely refused, but offered to meet with him after class to speak. He agreed to this but continued to brow-beat and threaten her with arrest if she did not come at the agreed upon time.

After agreeing to meet with her later in the day, he began to publicly emote. He raised his voice and took on the body language of a professional wrestler. He told various people in the vicinity that she was "stalling" him. His tone was aggressive and confrontational. "I do this for a living, I know when I'm being stalled!" The student who was on her way back to class, stopped and turned around.

"I'm w-what?" She asked in apparent confusion. At this point some ten feet away from the officer, and he moved toward her with determination. I was standing between the two of them. He stopped when he got near me and snapped at me, "get out of my face!" Given the fact that he had walked up to me, I felt that this was an un-reasonable demand. In the meantime, the student went back to class while the officer continued to emote.

In her absence he fretted that he was going to "look like an idiot," if she didn't meet him at four o'clock. He asked petulant questions, harangued those of us still present, caused a scene, and then left.

I stood amazed by what had just happened, and I thought about Charlie Chan. Like many Americans I derive at least some of my moral standards from the "movies," and it was from the iconic Asian-Hawaiian detective that I had first learned to respect the cops. Considering the positive signification of Asian policemen in my mind, the experience was particularly jarring. Never had my childhood hero browbeat and intimidated a pregnant woman; never had I seen him stand in a public hallway griping about the motives of a potential witness; and never had the venerable Chan complained that he would look like an idiot if a person of interest didn't show up for questioning.

But if such behavior is unacceptable in an average person, it is beyond contempt in a public servant. This point has a practical as well as moral dimension to it: it is understood by anyone who interacts with a person who is armed with a handgun that there is an unstated, but ever present, power differential. The person with the gun has an enormous amount of influence. That the armed person is a police officer does little to comfort the citizen who must deal with him. A policeman who walks up to a teacher who has only a red pen in his pocket, and tells him to, "Get out of my face!" is not only engaging in appalling behavior, he is also chipping away at the remaining veneer of respect and trust that we all want to have for our constabulary.

The recent decades have shown that law enforcement is not always the highly moral protectors of safety and service that they champion themselves to be. In fact, no longer are the police assumed to be virtuous. Recent examples of police and persecutory criminal activity continue to confirm this unpleasant fact. Several years ago, Alex Kozinski, a conservative judge on the 9th Circuit Appellate Court, stated that the fact of police perjury is, "an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges." In Los Angeles last year, the ugly details of the Ramparts precinct drug division became a matter of public record. These details included the theft of drugs by police officers as well as the "planting" of drugs on suspects. In one case, members of the unit planted a gun on a man they had shot and who remains paralyzed by the attack. Similar examples of police misconduct were reported by New York's Mollen Commission which stated, "The practice of police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: "testilying"
(http://www.constitution.org/lrev/dershowitz_test_981201.htm#N_10_> House of Representatives Judiciary Committee ). University of Florida Law professor, Christopher Slobogin, has recently produced an extensive survey of law enforcement perjury which indicate that such practices are endemic. From a moral point of view, a significant number of law enforcement personnel appear virtually indistinguishable from the thugs of the Cosa Nostra.

When the police help, we like the police. When they bully and bluster, which is too often the case today, we reasonably look for ways to protect ourselves. A policeman's job is hard, and it is supposed to be. In 1958's A Touch of Evil, Charlton Heston famously quipped, "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Indeed, unless we wish to pass on to the future a culture of Brown-Shirt authoritarianism, we should resist the idea of the moral exceptionalism of the police.

2007-01-07T13:42:00.002-08:00

Reflections on My Pacific Island Childhood.

Will I tell you that when I was a boy, there was time?
When I was a boy, I had time and I did not know that time was precious; I would loaf by the trees and eat my bologna sandwich, and fall asleep in the warmth of the sun. And when I awoke, there was time. I did not realize that it was hurrying past me. I lived in the hub of its wheel where I neither lost nor gained time, but I was still. And time was still with me and I was with time. And I was happy.

At dusk, I would carefully make a fire. The fire would warm me, and then I would go home. I would pass the pearl divers' huts and I envied their freedom. For a time I would linger by the pearl divers' huts and smoke papaya bark, and consider the undulating sea, until my mind burned with clarity.

Then, I walked on until I saw the smoking chimneys of my street, the smell of wet stone and burning wood and stale farts. The delight on my mother's face, the letter in her hand from my father, who had gone to Sydney for work, the pie she had baked. A time, lived in its own time, never guessing that it would one day be a memory.

A Friend's Grace is like a Well.

2006-12-28T17:06:00.001-08:00

A thousand times have you muddied the waters with your broken oar,
Though you knew the waters of friendship were clean and sweet,
Once given your cup, you sloshed your precious dram upon the floor
Thinking that to fill your friendship cup again was no great feat
But when the cup was empty, the well gave you no succor
Then, you sorely cursed the well, and cried into your sheets

Said you saw more than others; Shaman-like, your vision burned
But I knew you saw the future through mild hallucinations
I shall not pass again, and will on this road now sadly turn
You thought your vision was no more than an apotheosis
Was it all so clear to you, this homespun, back-woods divination?
You saw what was not there, and will suffer your own mind's spurn.

The Economy, Some Thoughts.

2006-12-28T16:26:00.001-08:00

If recent poles are to be believed, the level of tolerance that contemporary Americans show for economic inequality is relatively high. Perhaps because it is now less understood that Americas economic model is not the most successful on earth. According the The Economist,

“Over 70% of Americans support the abolition of the estate tax (inheritance tax), even though only one household in 100 pays it. Americans tend to blame their woes not on rich compatriots but on poor foreigners” (Economist).

This is in spite of the growing gap between rich and poor in the last quarter century, Americans continue to voice faith in the aphorisms of the American Dream as they attempt to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” and “make it.”

The construct of the “American Dream” promotes the belief that any person who is willing to work hard and “follow the rules” is almost guaranteed entry into (at the very least) the middle class. But while there is always an element of intention with a person escaping poverty, the statistics show that areas favoring upward mobility are distinguished from those with unfavorable climates. According to the Research on Economic Inequality,

“In the United States almost one-half of the children born to low-income parents become low- income adults. This is an extreme case, but the fraction is also high in the United Kingdom at four in ten, and Canada where about one-third of low-income children do not escape low income in adulthood” (Miles Corak, 2006, 13 (1), 143-188)

And, unless one believes Americans are by nature less thrifty or clever than their Canadian neighbors, it would stand to reason that the economic environment of the U.S. is less conducive to upward mobility. As the Economist put it recently, if one wants to enjoy economic success in America, he must first, "pick the right parents."