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October 25th, 2009
06:09 pm - And to the corporation, for which it stands
I have a good life. I try to keep this in perspective when I feel my blood begin to boil about some domestic issue over which I have little (if any) input or control. My mom, after a few years of battling to get health coverage, has it now and in the last few months she's had appointments with optometrists, dentists, OB/GYNs, neurologists and various other professionals. She's had her first mammogram in a decade, her first new pair of glasses in about 15 years, her first regular set of dental procedures including caps and filled cavities in about the same period of time. Things are just fine for me and mine.
And so I can disengage from time to time from all the political grandstanding and all the tea-less tea parties and all the war protests and really examine what's behind everything. I ask myself: "What compels someone to go to a rally to oppose health care reform? What compels someone to put on an orange jumpsuit, a black hood and chain themselves to the gates in front of the White House because of some people being detained at a Naval base in the Caribbean? When an advocacy group or lobbying interest spends millions of dollars to influence legislation, how many millions or billions do they stand to gain from a favorable amendment?"
The easiest actions to explain, from a simple gain/loss perspective, are those of corporate interests. In a free market system, the people who run corporations are ultimately judged by how big profits are during their time at the helm, how large the shareholder dividends, how high the common stock grows. Quite simply, a corporation will fight anything that will affect its bottom line and support anything (literally anything) that helps them trim costs or maximize earnings. It makes sense, cold though it may be.
So if you're an executive, you would have an excuse for waving signs denouncing health care reform, because it has the potential to affect the profitability of your company (depending on the company). But you don't need to, because you've got TV ads and billboards, lobbyists and campaign contributions. Those things are way more effective than yelling like a loon about Socialism on some courthouse lawn.
The other stuff, though, is more nuanced. If I go to the United States capital to dress up like a detainee and pretend to be waterboarded, what's my motivation? Am I afraid the government will detain me and do the same to me? Is one of my cousins at Gitmo? Am I just concerned with the wellbeing of humans in general? These are all possibilities. If I go to that same capital to protest new environmental regulations or to protest a trade agreement or to oppose health care reform, am I afraid these things will eliminate my job? Cut into my paycheck? Lower my standard of living? These are all possibilities.
Going farther yet, someone had to suggest these fears to motivate the protests, otherwise, where would the outrage come from? We aren't born with opinions on the Geneva convention or single-payer health coverage or union card-check legislation; someone has to point out to us the possible threats or problems with these things. Most of us have good lives, aren't being waterboarded, etc., so there's always outside stimuli. For the most part, it would appear that the progressive/liberal protests are driven by advocacy groups representing the under-represented. Not that they're always correct, not that they're always pure of heart and motive, but big money has no real stake in our African food aid policies, our interrogation handbook for foreign combatants, human rights abuses.
But big money has been behind the pushback against almost every single progressive policy initiative for the last century or so. Big money stands to lose when the little people gain. Big money buys those ads, buys those politicians, buys those billboards to keep the money flowing in, plain and simple. From Social Security to Medicare to the Civil Rights act to workers' rights issues such as the 40-hour workweek, overtime, the five-day workweek, big money -- more directly, corporate interests -- has been there to bankroll the opposition.
But money alone can't do all the work. So what about all these people yelling at town hall meetings, demonizing workers unions, losing sleep over some unholy alliance of Socialists and Fascists? Where do they get their fears?
I suppose you see where I'm going with this. The so-called "conservative" ideology of this Republic in the year of our lord two-thousand and nine is actually a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate interest. The Corporation as an institution has been a driving force for the growth of the industrialized world and for this we should always be thankful. Our comfortable way of life is possible because of the pioneering spirit of entrepreneurs the world over. But what the Corporation has become is something Henry Ford and his peers couldn't have countenanced. They weren't saints back then, but I have to think most executives didn't foresee the Corporation gaining all of the liberties of an individual and none of the responsibilities. I have to imagine the earliest stock brokers didn't imagine their inventive method for raising capital to operate a company being perverted to the point where greed has nearly ruined the entire world economy at dozens of different points over the last 80 years or so.
But then again, maybe they did see some of this. In the 1940s you had the AMA spreading fears about Socialized medicine using much of the same language today's dittoheads use. Dittoheads, by the way, who rarely have a stake in the profits that insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations stand to gain by keeping the common man poor, stressed and sick. In fact, many of these dittoheads ARE the poor, the stressed, the sick. In the United Kingdom in the 1940s, the British Medical Association spread those same fears, but Britons in the wake of WWII stood up and said that health care should be given according to need and paid for according to ability. That as a society, we should be judged by how we treat the worst-off among us.
What occurred to me today, though, is that I'm done with American conservatives until they can show me even an ounce of actual populist concern. The so-called conservatives have co-opted populist rhetoric to persuade the people least helped by pro-corporate policy to rally in defense of the bank accounts of people who make literally hundreds of times more money than they do. Not just on health care, not just on labor issues, not just on international policy, all of it. If you tell me you oppose labor unions, if you tell me you don't want to see government involved in health care, whatever, my first question to you will be: Are you an executive or preferred shareholder of a major corporation? If you say you aren't, I will immediately stop listening to anything you say. You are an automaton, a sheep, a mindless idiot, no matter how hard you think you've thought about these issues.
The 9/12ers say the government should be afraid of its citizens and I agree: but the problem is they and their ilk are scared stiff of the government, despite the fact that WE ARE the government. Here's an idea: Make the Corporation afraid of the citizens. I'm in a revolutionary mood, despite my comfortable life, and I'd like to tip the scales of justice back toward We the People a bit and away from the United Syndicates of America, and see whether we can't make life more comfortable for the other 95 percent of Americans.
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September 29th, 2009
02:52 pm - Those who forget history: Evidence of GOP idiocy
Really? I wrote my earlier post about Republicans confusing socialism, communism and fascism with tongue planted tentatively in cheek, but now there's actually a woman making money telling people that Obama is like Hitler because he wants civil rights and health care expansions (?)
At the How To Take Back America Conference last weekend, conservative speaker Kitty Werthmann led a workshop called “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.”
...
During her session, Werthmann went through a litany of examples of how President Obama is like Adolf Hitler. She noted that Hitler, who acted “like an American politician,” was “elected in a 100% Christian nation.” Although she failed to once mention Antisemitism or militarism, Werthmann explained how universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, and increased taxes were telltale signs of Nazism. Werthmann also warned the audience:
If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. [...] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. [...] And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.
REALLY? REALLY? REALLY? *breathes into paper bag* These people are the fringe, there's not very many of them, the only reason we know about them is the media's fetish for finding the weirdest and the loudest ... *repeats to self, rocks in chair*
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September 15th, 2009
02:42 pm - Just crossing fingers: Set for disappointing "reform"
The president gave a wonderful address to a joint session of Congress last week, taking the opportunity to gently eviscerate many of the hypocrites on the right side of the aisle while calling attention to conservative ideas that might actually have a role in fixing America's health care system. But what saddened me was what I didn't hear: A clarion call for real reform, a plan to pull the leeches (insurance companies) off Uncle Sam's arteries and set regulations to lessen the inflationary effect of ruthless profit-taking on our health care bills.
The facts: 40 million uninsured Americans (some of whom may just not WANT insurance, yes, but 40 million is a pretty unfathomably large number), per capita health care expenditures in excess of 150 percent of other industrialized countries' with the same or worse outcomes (particularly in WHO metrics), and a system that's arguably already more "socialist" than that of France, Germany or Switzerland, to name a few. It's not that our system needs to be more private or more public; it just needs to be more efficient.
And right at this moment, the president's stance seems to be more of the same lay-out-ideas-but-no-written-legislation-for-Congress-to-pass activity as before. He wants to make it so insurance companies can't deny you coverage, but what good is that if the actuaries at every single insurance company decide the base premium needs to double to offset the expenses incurred by being *gasp* forced to pay for claims? What good is insurance if people who need it can't afford it? Hasn't that been the question all along?
I'll admit that I'm coming to a conspiratorial viewpoint: That the president seems to refuse to give out a precise piece of legislation for his majority leaders to put up for vote suggests that he doesn't actually want sweeping reform at this stage. Playing out the Karl Rove scenario, Rahm Emanuel and the boys in the West Wing are building a house of cards that they expect the mean old Republicans to blow down, so that when a watered-down reform bill passes, all the Democrats can point fingers at the minority and complain about the obstructionist tactics they employ to keep all your sick friends and relatives from having affordable health care.
But of course anybody with even a little bit of brain activity will wonder "if the Democrats have such big seat majorities in Congress, why couldn't they just get what they wanted done?" I can almost guarantee even the people decrying the simple suggestion that Democrats use budget reconciliation measures to pass a health care bill would turn right around and say it's Dems' fault for NOT steamrolling the GOP and getting their plan through once the fingers start being pointed at the Right.
And I have to imagine the Democratic leadership don't have the stomach or the lobbyist-free lifestyle to ACTUALLY pass huge, sweeping reforms, because what if something goes wrong between now and next fall? And certainly by November 2012, enough "growing pains" would have become evident to guarantee a GOP takeover all over again right? And if the Dems turn on their friends in the insurance and pharma lobbies, there won't be nearly as large a warchest to fend off any possible Republican Revolution v. 2.0 scenarios, right?
In their frantic flailing to prevent a repeat of the Clinton administration's failure to pass health care reform/the original Republican Revolution, Democrats seem to have almost guaranteed some great level of failure, some level of public disquiet, some level of disappointment and disillusionment in that massive, enthusiastic group of grassroots volunteers who helped usher the Liberals into power. Frankly, looking back from this point in the road, Democrats could have pushed through the most radical proposals out there (Kucinich and Weiner both have single-payer bills in the shredder -- I mean hopper) and had MORE support and LESS people with Hitler signs and bullhorns. After all, if you have the power to pass something, the only thing letting the clock run accomplishes is allowing the opposition to start throwing up smokescreens.
Of course, I have my fingers crossed that we'll get something that actually improves our system instead of making it a bigger cash cow for the Anthems and Aetnas.
EDIT: It occurs to me presently that the federal level is likely a bad forum for this kind of reform talk. There've been cities, counties and states around this Republic of ours who have started to take real, tangible steps to lower costs and improve outcomes. Once again, the relative autonomy of individual state and local governments may wind up being a great asset.
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August 20th, 2009
12:51 am - Communism is not socialism is not fascism: A primer for the American Right
I figured out a while back why the American Right is so afraid of socialists. They don't know the difference between Communism with a capital C, the kind that led to the Iron Curtain and the Cuban Missile Crisis, etc., and socialism the construct, which in itself isn't a political system (as Communism is, where one party must rule, for instance) so much as an egalitarian concept of private/government partnership in guiding an economy. Marx and Engels used the word "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably, much like today's GOP does, but later, Lenin, who did more for Communism than anyone else to this point, arguably, defined socialism as a "step" between capitalism and Communism; a transitional phase, if you will.
So that confusion, while annoying, is at least understandable. What I haven't been able to figure out until presently is why people (and I use that term loosely) keep conflating health care reform -- or their fevered visions of a government administered, 100 percent socialist health care system -- and the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler, the former Chancellor of Germany who made fascism a twisted and methodical art form all its own. Hitler mustaches on pictures of Obama, cries of "Nazi plan" at town hall meetings ... what to make of this terrible ideological confusion? Sure there's some racial baiting going on here, the idea that if Obama wants reform, it must be some secret code for "reparations" for black people (of course, where they get the idea that all politics is coded in cyphers is beyond me ... oh wait a minute, that's all Bush did for eight years), but that can't account for it all, can it?
And then it hit me. It's rather simple really. A member of the Nazi party was formally known (in Germany, anyway) as a National Socialist. National Socialist becomes Socialist becomes Communist becomes terrible threat to all of man kind. The fact that the word "socialist" in those two applications (Goebbels vs. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for example) has two completely different meanings is probably lost on a lot of the same people who don't understand that socialist policies (like Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, etc.) are completely different from Communist ideals (lack of class stratification, assigned duties to people based on abilities, 100 percent centralized commerce, etc.).
So here we are. Fascism is confused with its polar opposite, Communism, and we wind up with people yelling about insurance companies' "right" to profit like we're back to baking Jews in ovens. Not that some of them would necessarily care about that though either, as evidenced by the classy lady in Las Vegas barking "Heil Hitler" at an old Jewish man who was talking about the care he received in Israel at a community forum. Fascism, though, is the authoritarian ideology that the strong shall inherit the earth, and not tomorrow either, like, TODAY, through military force, and that this is the only way humans can function as a society at our utmost potential. Fascists hate the idea of class divisions and they hate capitalists and Communists for basically the same reason: Both of them exploit class divisions for their own personal gain. Fascists just want one class: The best of the best. Which is, of course, why Hitler somehow came up with the Holocaust based on some readings on Hindu culture (fun fact, the swastika is actually a symbol of luck and prosperity in Hindu culture, and was for several thousand years before Hitler and his assholes co-opted it).
Now when I look at these poor, mistaken, brainwashed fools waving signs about socialist takeovers in one hand and swastikas with Obama's face on the other, I'll know: they just need to read a little more about political philosophies. Oh yeah, and stop being racist bastards too.
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August 15th, 2009
01:35 am - Culinary derringdo: Southwest Squash Casserole
I hate to be a tease, but I haven't actually tried this yet. It's a recipe I saw on allrecipes.com that sounded good, but the cooking instructions (entirely microwave based) were beyond stupid, so I wrote down the ingredients, made some notes about other complementary ingredients that might jazz it up a bit, and executed a game plan.
I sautéed the squash, onions, red peppers and mushrooms in olive oil and added the chiles right at the end to let the flavors seep together a bit. I spread the resulting goodness on the bottom of a large glass casserole pan (with some vegetable oil spray just for nonstickiness). Then I boiled an ear of two-tone sweet corn for eight minutes, stripped the kernels off the cob and added that to the menage, along with about 3/4 of the bag of shredded cheese (colby jack instead of just straight jack), mixed that up a bit, drained and rinsed a can of black beans, added a drained can of sliced jalapeño, the sour cream and whatever else I'm forgetting. I crunched the tortilla chips up over the top and then sprinkled the remaining shredded cheese over top, slapped it on the bottom rack of my oven for about a half-hour at 325ish F (though I turned it up to 350 for the last 10 minutes or so because it appeared the cheese wasn't melting evenly enough) and called it good when I saw the mixture doing some bubbling at the edges.
This will be my dinner for part of this week at work, so I'm hopeful it turned out well. I like all the ingredients, and they make sense together, so I don't foresee any heartbreak.
Seriously, screw the microwave on this one. Microwave casserole? This ain't the Jetsons, pal.
EDIT: I tried it, and it tastes pretty fantastic, but the veggies are still more raw than I'd like (in other words, it doesn't appear to have cooked through from the bottom as well as the top yet), so back into the oven for another round, this time I figure another 15 minutes at 400F to start, and then I'll check and do perhaps 5 minute increments as needed? This is the cutting edge, people. Culinary experimentation at its livest.
EDIT 2: 15 minutes at 400, then another 5, and it turned out great. The top even crusted over a bit more, giving it that nice casserole feel. This thing is pretty spicy, and I'd recommend less hardy souls not use a whole can of jalapeños or perhaps just stick to the mild chiles. Or substitute your favorite pepper. The world is yours, culinary adventurer.
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July 2nd, 2009
09:56 pm - My new pipe
Happy early birthday to myself. I bought an affordable but quality bent-stem Kaywoodie billiard pipe to break in and puff on. I'm becoming an old man. Thanks to Courtney for letting me have her lost-and-found pipe to experiment with (and then accidentally ruin, whoops).
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May 31st, 2009
02:19 pm - Your God is a voice in your head: Dr. George Tiller shot at church
This morning at a Lutheran church in Wichita, Kan., Dr. George Tiller, 67, was shot dead. The headlines you read in the coming days about his death, including one I will almost certainly write later today, will invariably simplify his life to "controversial abortion provider" or "abortion lightning rod" or something along those lines.
Of course, it must be so, because these are true statements. What's more, they're statements that crystallize the man's work, so that people reading a paper or a Web site who have heard of all the attempts on his life, the bombings and protests at his clinics, the legal challenges that have been aired out and wind up with his name and his practice being cleared unanimously by a jury of his peers, will be able to at once recognize him and recognize what has happened.
I'm sure for a lot of people this will be a tragic revelation, regardless of what side of the abortion "debate" you're on. Even many of the most rabid pro-lifers, such as the wackos at Operation Rescue, can agree that killing someone is a fairly counterproductive means to arguing in defense of "life." But unless you're a person who has had their life threatened by the rare and horrible complications that can arise late in a pregnancy -- later than most states' laws allow abortions to be performed -- you may not recognize that this 67-year-old, married, church-going grandpa was the only person in the country who could perform the late-stage abortion techniques he did. You know the whole "partial-birth abortion" thing? He was trained to do it, and many times he did it because church-going, God-fearing, compassionate and grief-stricken people asked for the procedure -- so that the family would have a body to give a Christian burial.
It's not just ghetto teens and welfare queens who have abortions: Fully 1 in 3 women have had one by the time they're 45, and 60 percent of all abortions are performed on women who have one or more living children. My mom had an abortion in the mid 1980s, after giving birth to myself and my sister, and while still married to my dad. But even if my mom hadn't CHOSEN to have an abortion, I would still be acutely aware that, for women who go to see Dr. Tiller, it often is NOT a choice, unless you consider choosing to die during or before a stillbirth delivery a choice.
And now even that last-ditch, life-saving option is lost to us. Who knows if anyone else anywhere else will be able to fill Dr. Tiller's position in our tenuous reproductive health care system. Who knows if anyone else would want to, given the constant and justified fear of wackos shooting at you, no matter where you are, even in a house of God. And speaking of God, no matter what faith you have or whether you have any faith at all; no matter your conception of God as creator or God as dispassionate observer or God as collective consciousness or anything else, may God have mercy on us all.
Correction: There are two other doctors in the country who can perform late-term abortions, though I'm not sure whether they can go quite as late as Dr. Tiller could. One of those doctors, Dr. Warren Hern of Colorado, had some justifiably angry words for the "pro-life movement," both the wackos and the supposedly sane ones who stand by silently when extremist rhetoric enters the discourse.
Warning: Don't read the comments at that story, unless you want to have a rage-on of your own.
Update: A suspect is in custody and if he is who the police say he is, he has a criminal history and a traceable Internet presence on on anti-choice Web sites and forums.
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May 30th, 2009
02:08 am - Corporeal warming, or, how I became cold-blooded
I'm getting older, it's true, but I've adopted a somewhat more peaceful philosophy toward aging than some of my contemporaries. Though I can't quite call myself full-fledged Buddhist, I've learned to see the usefulness in nearly every occurrence in life, particularly the challenges, which tend to be opportunities for us to show our true mettle as good and virtuous people.
But there's one challenge that's really starting to irk me, and it's somewhat new to me. Sometime in the last six months or so, I became over-sensitive to heat. And when I say heat, I mean like anything north of 70F or so. It's actually fairly ridiculous, I know.
My sweat glands aren't quite as bad as the most sweaty sweaters (people, not woven garments) I've ever met, but I can say with some certainty that I've reached the level of Guy You Wouldn't Necessarily Prefer to Guard in Basketball, What With All the Soaking on His Shirt. I'd noticed over the last few years there's been faster and more profuse perspiration in the crotchal region, but now the Swamp Ass as I call it has become something of a Swamp Thing; an overall sheen of desperation for an air conditioner.
It's irritating. Tonight, for example, I sit here in my apartment with the sliding glass door to my patio fairly wide open. Outdoors, the temp is 57F. Indoors, my handy atomic clock/calendar/thermometer tells me, it's 70.7F. I had to TAKE OFF MY SHIRT about 20 minutes ago BECAUSE I WAS TOO HOT.
Yes, I've been cooking and doing dishes, but that was a while ago. And if the thermometer says 70, well dammit it's pretty close to 70 where I sit, not four feet from said thermometer. And yet I type to you shirtless as the day I was born. Why is this a big deal, you might ask, plenty of dudes I know take their shirts off for no reason at all.
This is a big deal because I rarely take my shirt off. Sure, dans la boudoir avec mon belle cherie I get pretty nude. Sometimes, living alone, I like to air dry a bit after a shower. But rarely am I just sitting here in a T-shirt when, all of a sudden, a compulsion of biological impulse washes over me with such force that I push my shirt off the top of my head, noticing the cool dampness from the sweat that had accumulated on my back. IN A T-SHIRT.
I'm trying to keep my cool -- pardon the pun -- about this, but quite frankly it's a bit gross. I've always been a tidy fellow with regards to hygiene (with an obvious exception for facial hair, which doesn't stink), so butt sweat, back sweat, neck sweat and chest sweat are all reasons for irritation.
I blame my dad's genes, which have also bequeathed me with male pattern baldness and body hair. When I was young, dad spent quite a bit of his evenings before bed (and after his shower, which he did at night after work due to the filthiness of his profession, auto body painting and repair) sans shirt. And I reckon, seeing as how I didn't really know my dad before I was about 4 and he was about 27, it's about time for me, at 26.85 or so, to start watching for these unavoidable signs of aging.
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May 4th, 2009
05:12 pm - New Year's Eve
For the last few years, I've been a champion of the grassroots movement (of one) to change the calendar so January 1 falls right about now instead of when it does, in the dead of winter. I chose Cinco de Mayo as the new New Year kind of arbitrarily because A. the weather's almost always gorgeous and B. people are already in the mood to drink for no real reason.
Think about it: With January 1 where it is in the earth's wobble/rotate schedule, it's the dog days of summer down under and the dead of winter up here. Australians get to celebrate every new year in shorts, surfing ... certainly never huddling together in the freezing cold in Times Square to watch a shiny orb drop 30 feet or so. By moving the beginning of our Roman-based calendar to now (or perhaps even the vernal equinox), you're evening the playing field. Aussies and other Southern Hemisphere dwellers would still have decent weather for their celebrations and the majority of us (those of us in the northern half of the globe) would likely have utterly fantastic weather, from Miami to Toronto to London to Glasgow to Tokyo and all points in between. And I hear the Mediterranean is beautiful this time of year.
So although I've been observing Cinco de Mayo as my own personal New Year's Day for a couple years, I'm hoping this movement picks up steam. Even if only one of you joins me, that swells our ranks by 100 percent!
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March 11th, 2009
02:30 pm - This is my hometown
The unemployment rate for February in Elkhart was 19 percent. It may get a little higher yet, but there aren't many RV manufacturers or other factories left that haven't already cut down to skeleton crews or folded entirely, so perhaps we're "forming a bottom" as the analysts like to say.
When I used to think of unemployment rates this high, I always thought of Flint, Mich., or any large city in the Great Depression, with people killing rabbits to eat from their own back yards or putting on their fedora and going down to get in line for some day-old bread at the baker. I used to let the desolation play out across my mind, imagining whole cities crumbling, every head of household a beggar.
But now I know better. Elkhart isn't a hellscape. Things have changed, but the people here are still the same people who were here about 15 months ago, when the jobless rate was around 4 percent. Now one in five of my fellow residents are jobless, and lines do form -- at the WorkOne office, at the FSSA, at the Social Security building -- with more and more hard-working, prideful people completely out of options.
I've been privileged in a sense -- many senses really, given that I still have a job -- to be in the middle of this, to see how humanity reacts in times of hardship that don't come with labels like "disaster" or "terrorist attack." This was a relatively sudden economic collapse, but it still happened over the course of 12 months (thus far), which is a hell of a lot slower-paced than a hurricane, for example. The change has been gradual and the people's reaction has been heartening.
Food pantries, churches and other community organizations are getting more help than ever, which of course is a good thing since they're giving more help than ever. People are rallying around friends and family members who lose their livelihood and showing that universal truth that we're all connected, that whatever happens to my neighbor also happens to some degree to me.
And working at a newspaper, I get to listen as these events sound a steady drumbeat of loss and grief and help and compassion. The president visited last month, which was the third time in the last 8 months he'd been in our county. We've been described by the New York Times as "the white-hot center of the national recession," and we've been featured on national news more times than I can count since the beginning of the year (including several networks just last night).
MSNBC.com approached my newspaper with a project: They'd move some reporters and producers to Elkhart for a few months. They'd buy a foreclosed home to live in, they'd shoot video and attend city council meetings and go talk to people on the unemployment line and just generally experience what I've experienced -- what we Elkhartans have experienced -- for the last several months. They'd turn our town into the ultimate reality show: the reality of what happens when the legs come out from underneath a city's economy. And it'd all be shown on MSNBC.com, and our reporters and photographers would have a hand in the telling of the story. As it was last night here: Food caravan stops in hard-hit county
My managing editor wisely said yes. Ours is a cautionary tale but it's also an inspiring one. We're positioning ourselves to be as strong as possible when the companies start calling to build or inhabit factories here again. We're not perfect, but we seem to understand what needs to be done in order to survive situations like this. And I think people around the country, if not the world, should see that you can survive; that it's difficult but not impossible and certainly not crushing. The devastating poverty of the Third World is much more profound, but for many of us it's also much harder to relate to. We can't imagine what it must be like to live in an utterly deprived village in Uganda, but we might be able to fathom what it's like to lose a job and not be able to find another.
The truth is we aren't any different, we privileged few, than our brothers and sisters starving a world away. Our circumstances are different but we're all the same people. If people can start by recognizing the universality of Elkhart's suffering, of Flint's suffering, of individuals trying to make the best of a bad situation beyond their control, perhaps our story can be a stepping stone to recognizing ourselves in the most desperate and impoverished among us.
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February 17th, 2009
02:25 pm - Our president needs to do more food reviews
In the summer of 2001 then-State Sen. Barack Obama appeared on a Chicago restaurant review show called "Check, Please!" and took the gang to Dixie in Hyde Park. Obama talks about his soul food favorites in the same measured tone he uses to talk about economics or constitutional law.
Saturday's his weekly YouTube/radio address, perhaps he could review D.C.-area eateries on Sundays?
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January 29th, 2009
04:44 pm - Jan. 29, a BLACK letter day
Today is the day I'm done paying credit card debt. I just got the call from my credit counseling agency that I'm paid in full on all accounts on record with them. I'm so excited and surprised (I thought I wouldn't be done until late February or March at the earliest) that I don't even know how to act. I guess it'll really sink in next Friday when I get paid and $140 DOESN'T get skimmed right off the top for my creditors.
That's $280 "extra" a month. That's like suddenly having my car payment paid by somebody else every month. For proportion's sake, I pay $480 a month in rent. That's more than half a month's rent every month from here on out. We may be on a wage freeze at work, but this is the equivalent of a 15-plus percent raise (I haven't sat down to calculate it exactly).
This is what I've been working toward for more than 4 and a half years.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/acedia/littlegent/ecstatic.gif) ecstatic
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01:15 am - Communing with kitties
A little while ago I was sitting on my couch and Eleanor, my female cat, jumped up next to me and started taking a bath. I absent-mindedly started scratching her under one of her front legs as she laid on her side licking her other front paw and dragging it across her face. I was slouched down in the couch to the point where I was nearly laying down myself, and when she started purring, I could feel the vibrations in my own chest. And then she looked up at me and started bathing me, licking my beard.
Over the next 15 minutes or so I slipped into extreme kitty meditation, petting her as she alternated between bathing herself and bathing my beard, feeling her purring and feeling her warmth. I closed my eyes and I could have fallen asleep very easily. I don't mean to eroticize this episode because I don't think it's erotic; rather it was a moment in time of extreme comfort and connection between two animals, basically. To call it "love" is a bit misleading, too, because while it's certainly true that I love my cats, I think their attitude toward me is more primal, a deep and abiding kinship. They accept me and the fact that Eleanor "bathes" me fairly regularly is just one sign of that.
Would she "bathe" other people? Yeah, I think she would. I'm not the only person capable of these kinds of connections with these animals, clearly, but it is heartening to know that my pets feel comfortable here and accept me as a key part of their environment. It makes me feel very content, very fortunate.
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January 4th, 2009
04:54 pm - απολογία
I've always considered myself, among other things, a good listener, a sympathetic soul, an honest dude, a moderate. One of the things I value most about myself is my ability to see the grey between the black and white of a given situation. Things are never as good as you'd like or as bad as you fear.
But recently I've lost my way and, best as I can tell, have tried to elicit reactions from friends by rubbing sore spots, as it were. I don't understand what they do and so in an attempt to gain understanding, I unconsciously reach through their skin and probe for the gristle and sinew, not trusting them to give me a proper accounting of their actions.
Of course, this is hardly the way to treat anyone, let alone friends. When I see people I care about making what I think may be a big mistake, something that could wind up harming them, it's extremely hard for me to keep quiet. And when I do my unwelcome probing, particularly lately and with one friend in particular, it only serves to harden them and turn them away from any advice or counsel I want to provide. And then I'm stung for having poked the hornet nest too hard, and can only hope the bees are able to rebuild the combs and forgive me on their own time, because what can I do to rebuild a hornet nest, you know? Etc.
So this doubles as a public apology to the person I'm referring to, who will read this but I certainly don't expect to comment or out themselves in any way, and a reminder to my future self and any other people who have these tendencies to find more delicate ways to interact with friends in precarious emotional positions. I'm sorry.
Current Music: Mick Boogie and Young Chris - Never Change | Powered by Last.fm
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December 27th, 2008
02:18 am - Memes are my only motivation
A. Each tagged person must post 8 things about themselves on their journal.
B. At the end, you have to choose and tag 8 people.
1. I learned to read at age 2, but never learned to ride a bike.
2. I've always been utterly and almost embarrassingly clean (hygiene-wise anyway), but lately I've grown a somewhat scraggly beard and I've only been showering roughly every 2.3 days on average. I should say this is since it's gotten cold here.
3. I've been playing an embarrassingly high amount of video games lately, though mainly just Football Manager. I SPEND HOURS AT A TIME BUILDING MY LITTLE FOOTY DYNASTY. When I got an in-game e-mail that I was being considered as the successor to Sir Alex Ferguson as manager of Manchester United, even though I hate the Red Devils I got a little shiver of excitement at the prospect of turning them down. And also, I've made it as a Premiership manager.
4. Like the person who tagged me for this meme, I have very little control of myself when it comes to money. I struggle from paycheck to paycheck, often overdrawing on my checking account and subjecting myself to fees over the course of several days of agonizing over being literally flat broke. But then when I get paid, I feel like a damn Rockefeller and it's hard to resist buying things I've coveted for a while but seem like luxuries when my checking account is at $20 with a week to go until the next payday.
5. I tend to fall for women who are either really far away or move away soon after I fall for them. It's a really strange pattern and I'm starting to think it might have something to do with where I live. Here's a hint: The unemployment rate here is now around 14 percent.
6. I get fairly stressed out about travel. I'm very much a homebody and so having to relax/unwind/sleep in beds that aren't my own (sexscapades are the exception of course) feels like I'm being dangled at the end of a bungee cord. And I have a love/hate relationship with flying. If the plane is a decent sized one and the engine noise isn't too bad, I like flying. But the last few times I flew I was in a puddlejumper, a seemingly 40-year-old DC-9 that was cold and actually sweated condensation on its interior metal surfaces, and it was at the whim of every slight crosswind and I was absolutely terrified the whole 90ish minutes of the flight (I'm just glad it wasn't that long). That said, I am getting a lot more interested in travel, specifically international travel, though due to No. 4 I doubt I'll be able to afford to any time in the near future.
7. Oh, also about women: I have the hots for older ladies. Like even if you're closing in on 40, or if you're Julianne Moore, 50 (or if you're Helen Mirren, 80 or whatever), if you've got it, you've got it. As Andre 3000 sings in "Pink and Blue," Miss lady! You could have been born a little later but I don't care. So what if your head sports a couple of grey hairs? Same here and actually I think that's funky (in a Claire Huxtable type way). I'd love to have a hot sugar momma, be a kept man.
8. Though I'm not particularly pious, I consider myself a fledgling Buddhist, and as such I've taken a much less judgmental view of the world over the last year or so. I can empathize with a much greater swath of humanity (and indeed all living things) than I used to and I think this is making me a much better sympathetic listener. I put myself in the person's shoes but I also put myself in the shoes of the other players in their life and I give them honest appraisals of how I see things. I don't just automatically say "he's a jerk" when a friend comes to me stung by a love interest; I listen and many times I'm able to pick apart the maybe-jerk's seemingly idiotic actions so that the plaintiff can see it's not a black and white situation. Almost nothing is, I find.
I'm gonna tag ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) circesissy , kdotdammit (because you shouldn't stop journaling/drawing/writing or anything else!), eris_devotee , cut_dead , styloroc_2000 , helselonearth , ernestinewalker and pills (to see what you come up with that I DON'T already know).
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December 15th, 2008
05:32 pm - Welcome to Siberia, Indiana
The forecast daytime high for today was 25. It was about 53 degrees at midnight, warmer than it had been all day Sunday. The temperature fell steadily through the pre-dawn hours and even after the sun rose, bottoming out around 9 Fahrenheit. At the point of the day you might expect the daytime high -- 1 to 3 p.m. -- it hovered around 15 F, -9 C. Oh, and I can't find my cap.
The sun has been down about an hour and the temperature is still 15 F, which is the forecast overnight low. I'm befuddled by this weather and apparently the forecasters are, too.
Tottenham unveiled their new stadium plans for the White Hart Lane adjacent lot and it looks gorgeous. I'm happy to be a Hoosier but what I wouldn't give to make a pilgrimage to North London when this thing is done. Like a British football mecca. I'm not much for travel, but football is making me ache to visit Barcelona, Milan, London; witness firsthand the delerium incited by a Messi chip, an Ibrahimovic blast, a Drogba run.
Current Music: World Soccer Weekly Inc - World Soccer Daily Podcast for Monday, December 15, 2008 | Powered by Last
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November 8th, 2008
05:08 pm - 45 things about me, most of which are a bit odd
45 ODD things about you! FILL IT OUT and pass it on and also back to the person who sent it to you! Learn 45 things about your friends, and let them learn 45 things about you! I stole this from mehinda
1. Do you like blue cheese salad dressing? Oh yeah, can't get enough of that delicious mold!
2. Favorite late night snack? Almost all of my snacking is done late at night, and it generally involves black bean quesadillas or ham/corned beef/cabbage/swiss sandwiches or cereal.
3. Do you own a gun? No, though I do want to get a concealed carry license here at some point when I have the money.
4. What's your favorite drink at Starbucks or other specialty coffee shop? Espresso, the hard stuff.
5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? Nah, my doctor's a good dude. I did get nervous when I thought my heart was exploding, though.
6. What do you think of hot dogs? They are almost always great.
7. Favorite Christmas song? Bing's "White Christmas"
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? OJ or soda, which is bad, I know.
9. Can you do push-ups? Yes, but I prefer doing pull-ups.
10. What's your favorite piece of jewelry? I'll sub in "accessory" for this since I'm a dude and say my new Armani glasses.
11. Favorite hobby? Internet, kitties, Internet cats
12. Do you have A.D.D.? Not officially.
13. What's one trait that you hate about yourself? First that comes to mind is my inability to save money.
14. The last disease you contracted? A cold, currently.
15. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment. 1. I'm tired. 2. I'm tired of my nose running. 3. I wish I wasn't so tired.
16. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink? Water, soda, milk (I'm not drinking booze, currently)
17. Current worry right now? MONEY, ALWAYS MONEY.
18. Current hate right now? Eh, nothing has my ire currently.
19. Favorite place to be? At home playing with my darling cats or playing video games while the cats sleep.
20. How did you ring in the New Year? In Chicago, attended a party, got pleasantly drunk.
21. Like to travel? Not particularly.
22. Name three people who will complete this: I feel like Amanda would, and perhaps my sister. Maybe Sara Bauer?
23. Do you own slippers? Yes, two pairs: One set of grey houseshoes and one that looks like gorilla heads.
24. What color shirt are you wearing? Grey.
25. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets? No, my leg hairs get snagged in it.
26. Can you whistle? Yes
27. Favorite singer/band? Spoon
28. Could you ever make it 39 days on the show Survivor? Nope. Nor would I really want to. I'm not much for the outdoors, frankly.
29. What songs do you sing in the shower? Jamie Lidell, Smokey Robinson, Sam Cooke, 112, any R&B I've properly memorized.
30. Favorite girl's names? Eleanor, Isabella, Irina, Guadalupe, many many other Latino ones.
31. Favorite boy's name? Benjamin, Andrew (it helps to like one's own name, but I wouldn't do a Jr. thing with my first son), Ignacio, many many other Latino ones.
32. What's in your pocket right now? Keys, BlackJack.
33. Last thing that made you laugh? The ESPN Soccernet podcast (talking about Maradona being Argentina's national team coach).
34. Like your job? LOVE
36. Do you love where you live? Oh it's fine.
37. How many TVs do you have in your house? For the first time in my life, zero.
38. Who is your loudest friend? I really don't have any loud friends anymore.
39. Do you drive the speed limit or speed? Slight speeding, generally to stay with the traffic flow.
40. Does someone have a crush on you? I'm guessing so.
41. What is your favorite book? Crime and Punishment, which sounds cliche I know, but it really is.
42. What is your favorite candy? PayDay.
43. Favorite Sports Team? Oy I have too many sports I follow. I guess right now I'd have to say Tottenham Hotspur.
44. What were you doing 12 AM last night? Playing with kitties!
45. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up today? I hope my kitties didn't destroy anything.
Current Music: ESPN - Soccernet: 11/6 | Powered by Last.fm
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November 6th, 2008
02:26 am - The high plain of dignity and discipline (not really)
Here's the thing, folks: Racism ain't dead. The Bush Doctrine ain't dead. Bible thumpers; bigots; Rush Limbaugh; "trickle-down" economic believers; selfish trust fund babies who worry exclusively about the capital gains and inheritance taxes; hypercapitalists; people who talk about the poor as though they're our nation's worst enemy and greatest shame; people who think we can just shoot our way out of our drug problems, our gang problems, our foreign policy disagreements; people who use words like "towelhead" and "sand nigger" unironically; people who use religion as a cudgel to beat people who think differently from them into submission, they're all still here, and they'll be here as long as humans walk the earth. President Barack Obama doesn't end any of this, let alone our economic woes, our very real debts, our deadly reliance on foreign petroleum, our pair of failed "wars," anything.
And I could go on about how a black president (and not just a rumored black president like Harding) is a symbol of freedom, of the American Dream, of our ability to truly pursue happiness, but you've likely already heard it all since Obama gave his keynote address at the 2004 DNC, since King and Ali and Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan and Elijah Muhammad and Mandela and Fred Shuttlesworth, since M. Gandhi and JFK and RFK and Frederick Douglass and Abe Fucking Lincoln. AND JESUS CHRIST. EQUALITY, LIBERTY, IT'S ON OUR FUCKING MONEY, PEOPLE.
You've heard all that. And the reality is, this election doesn't make anybody any more or less free. It doesn't put money in anyone's pocket or gas in anyone's car. It didn't give out a few million jobs and rehabilitate a few thousand criminals. It didn't stop -- or even really ease -- suffering here or anywhere else in the world. The president is one slice of our government, a government almost unimaginably huge and complex and weighed down with decades of expansion and contraction (and then yet more expansion) depending on who got what into which omnibus spending bill before midnight any given March or April or October in the District of Columbia, in well-furnished rooms on K Street with the blinds drawn, in plain daylight with the cameras of C-SPAN recording it all. Even if Barack Obama stepped down tomorrow to appoint JESUS CHRIST, SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HIS PLACE, laws would still be written by Congressmen and Senators, votes for cloture and pieces of "pork" and reading things into the Congressional record and yielding time to the gentleman from Ohio would still rule the day. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is any more broken.
And everything in the paragraph preceding this one would hold true if it were president-elect John S. McCain and his lovely vice president-elect Sarah Palin. The world wouldn't end, nor would anything be fixed simply by the fact that they'd won an election, a popularity contest, a pageant.
But here's the thing: It feels different. Elkhart has a pretty sizeable minority population. As strange and reverse-racist and saccharine as this sounds, whenever I saw a black person or hell, even an Hispanic person today, I remembered we'd just elected a black president. And not because he's black, or even despite it, really. He's just another president, except for the fact that we've never had a president with skin any darker than ruddy pink or Georgia peach or Crawford-sun-baked brown. And when I thought about that, I got a little happier.
I know he's not perfect. I plan to hawk his every move just as I have the outgoing president (by the way, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel? Not exactly an olive branch there, Barry) and hold him to the same high standards of the office that every president has faced. But when you're talking about blacks and Mexicans and Chinese and any other minority group, any other cultural swatch in this quiltlike republic, and when, in the back of your mind, you're cognizent of the fact that a minority, the son of an African dude, a guy who grew up in Hawaii and went to school in Indonesia or some crap and somehow still became the president of the Harvard Law Review is now the president of the United States, well it's not overstating it to say that in one very intangible, very intrinsic way, EVERYTHING has changed.
I don't care if that sounds hokey. I don't care if that sounds bright-eyed or naive or bleeding-heart or anything else. I have a half-black sister. I have Mexican friends, black friends. I know what these people face on a daily, hourly, constant basis. It's not overt, they're not being beaten with chains or lynched or burned or arrested for being in the wrong part of town or anything. But they see women clutch their purses or roll their windows up as they approach. They see people's eyes dart. They see people whispering or talking softly and wonder "are they talking about me?" and it's not a particularly far-fetched or paranoid proposition because more often than not, they have found people talking about them in hushed tones around corners or behind doors. To even comprehend for a moment what this is like is to know the horrible truth of being a minority, whether it's a black man in Manhattan or a white man in New Delhi. It's no wonder black men have hypertension and angina and all these other stress-related health issues in greater abundance than whites. It's no wonder the life expectancy of Hispanics in America is a few years shy of whites'. We talk about post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers returning from war or from people who were abused as children, but what about current-trauma stress disorder? What about constant-paranoia due to the VERY COLOR OF YOUR SKIN stress disorder? This is why I tend not to make light of Michael Jackson's never-ending plastic surgeries. It's really not funny, even if you're the biggest musical talent in the world.
But now a skinny black guy from the South Side of Chicago, a guy with sticky-outy ears and a funny, vaguely menacing name, a guy whose favorite sport is basketball and is a nerd and knows Constitutional law inside and out, who's an academic and a philanthropist and a GODDAMN COMMUNITY ORGANIZER and not really all that much of a Socialist, even when you compare his platform to the way the GOP's vice-presidential nominee runs her state, but really, why is Socialism a bad word in the first place, a guy who seems to genuinely care about helping people and won't take away your goddamn guns or your goddamn wealth or your goddamn Bibles despite all the slings and arrows he's endured from the same people who would do all those things to "MUSLIM TERRORISTS" and "TOWELHEADS IN PAKISTAN" if given the chance, the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas is the president elect of these United States. My country.
And so when I look at a black man now, and I get a little giddy because I imagine a country where women don't clutch their bags a little tighter when that same black man just happens to be on the same sidewalk as them, and when I imagine that my sister, at 13, truly doesn't have a ceiling anymore for what she can do with her life, you'll just have to excuse me. I guess I'm just a wild-eyed, naive, bleeding-heart optimist. And I couldn't be much more happy to be one.
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November 5th, 2008
08:23 pm - The Barry Boom?
I haven't been much in the mood to write lately, though I do want to share my thoughts about election-y stuff eventually. For now, though, consider the possibility of a baby boom in July-August of next year, particularly in the Chicago area. I know if I had a girlfriend, I'd have been laying the ol' pipe for a long, long time last night. I've seen a fair amount of photos of couples looking very amorous at Grant Park last night, so that's just something to keep in mind. At least we know they'll be happy and open-minded, compassionate kids. Reckon any Republicans would have been similarly sexified had McCain won? Somehow I doubt it.
Props to Josette for bringing this to my attention the other night.
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November 4th, 2008
11:27 am - A more perfect union
I was the 690th person to cast a ballot at the polling place for Osolo Township precincts 38 and 39. That was at quarter to 11 this morning, less than halfway through the voting day.
It's a gorgeous day today, meteorologically speaking, but it's also a good day to be out among your fellow citizens. Regardless of party affiliation, people in this corner of the world all seem to be smiling today, happy to be a part of this 232-year-old experiment we call democracy. Or maybe it's just the nice weather. It's probably both.
This is the first time I've ever seen anyone younger than me coming in or out of a polling place. In 2004 and 2006 I voted early; absentee, but in person, so to speak. The primary this year was exclusively older people, at least when I went. Today, the first three voters I saw were young white woman, young white woman and older black woman.
Then a bunch of old people, but then there were some more youthful-looking people! It took me about 20 minutes from the time I got in line to the time I put my ballot in the black lock box, and I probably saw at least 10 people I'd reckon were younger than me (I'm 26), plus a high-school kid who was either a poll judge's son or an especially civic-minded youngster.
I'm excited by all the reports of high voter turnout because frankly I've been a bit chagrined by my democracy to this point in my life. We're supposedly the world's only remaining superpower, and to get 50 percent of registered voters to the polls on any given election cycle is about the best we can muster. In Israel, something like 90 percent of voters cast their ballots. In Iraq it's damn near 100 percent, and those people have to risk their lives to go vote. In many more peaceful nations, turnout is low if it's anything less than 70 percent. Supposedly, we're expecting 60 percent today.
I hope we get more than that, but even 60 is a good first step toward reminding people of the importance and, really, the privilege of voting for one's political leaders. I know technically it's a right, but for so many people in the world, it's a treat. If we start looking at it that way, the future looks brighter for these United States.
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