Brian’s Page

Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.
– Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

A Farewell Nocturne

Last modified on 2010-08-31 23:05:52 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

After I had put in the order to cancel our hosting as of 9/21, it occurred to me that we won’t be here in October to celebrate the Chopin competition. I am generally not a great lover of artistic competitions, and tend to think that they run counter to the purpose and practice of art. This is the point made by George C. Scott in refusing the Academy Award: he did not see competition with his peers as furthering his art.

But the Chopin competition is as distinguished for the extraordinary careers of its “losers” as it is for its winners. True, Maurizio Pollini (1960), Martha Argerich (1965), Krystian Zimerman (1975), and Garrick Ohlsson (1970) were very worthy winners. But in 1970, Mitsuko Uchida finished second to Ohlsson; and in 1955, Vladimir Ashkenazy finished second to Adam Harasiewicz — which of those last two have you heard the most of since then? Thus, it is a “competition” only in name, and really more of a stage where young pianists can be heard by audiences, impresarios, and recording companies.

It is also — especially this year, the 200th anniversary year of Chopin’s birth — a celebration of the music. Scientists tell us that, long after the demise of humanity, radio waves traveling far into deep space will be the only surviving vestiges of our civilization. It is strangely reassuring to know that Chopin’s music may be audible to some other or future life form in the universe, after our species’ presence on this planet is a dim cosmic memory. For whoever hears it, and has the heart and mind to appreciate the immaculate sublimity of a masterpiece like the C Minor Nocturne, will then know that the unknown beings through whom such beauty was made were, whatever their faults and errors, sometimes true to the great cosmic harmony.

The performance here is from the young German pianist, Andreas König.

Making Reality Come True

Last modified on 2010-08-31 19:46:11 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

We live in a fantasy-driven advertising culture built on a glistening swamp of dreams. It seeps into the groundwater of our politics; drips dust-like and white, like the marks on Glenn Beck’s blackboard, into the breath of the public media-mind; it congeals around the rock of the new Trinity, wealth, fame, power. But reality shows us that there is no darker fate than to live out one’s fantasy.

Over the weekend we mentioned Tiger Woods, a man who was given the vast gift, training, and privilege to be allowed to live a fantasy; we now see what he has done with it. If you have read any of the gruesomely fascinating literature on Lotto winners and the destruction that their dream-come-true moment wrought amid their lives, you know some more common examples of this theme. Lindsay and Paris — this week’s tabloid creatures of fantasy’s swamp — reveal to us the glistening slime on the underbelly of the Dream. Tonight, the President whose power is drawn from the swamp of fantasy will unfurl his oratorical splendor before us in proclaiming a new era of closure, transformation, progress — as a dozen or so more flag-draped boxes are quietly shipped into the darkness behind him, out of reach of the microphones and cameras.

Every cloud must have a silver lining, our provincial wisdom declares. So every fantasy must have its feeding darkness. Natural life is clear and bright, even amid its challenges and dangers; yet, as the old Chinese poet mused some 2,500 years ago, “people seem compelled by distraction and complexity.” Even the most glaringly perfect fantasy must, it seems, carry an abyss within its belly.

It is, of course, the obsession with perfection that creates the abyss. Only the superficial can appear ideal. The imitation of Christ is a cloying veneer; the attempt to own the mylar image of the Ideal. If we could but learn to “imitate” our own true selves, the connection with the divine would take care of itself.

Another way lies open to each of us, and thankfully, it is more open to the ordinary life than it is to the golf star, the idol, or the President. We can choose to reveal and to explore the substance of ourselves, our lives, our relationships. The rewards of such a journey far exceed the tawdry emoluments of fame, power, or wealth; because this clearer and more grounded path leads out of the swamp of fantasy and into the open air of reality. We need, as individuals and as a culture, to disperse the vapid obsession over whether dreams can come true, and work instead to make reality come true.

This, incidentally, is the focus of my counseling practice. I have occasionally wished that it were otherwise; that I could offer a Secret, a Power-Belief System of such magic and grandiosity as to be like walking beside God or Oprah. But it is only like walking beside yourself. Most of my clients have found that alone to be quite renewing and liberating.

Inside the Trojan Horse of Wealth

Last modified on 2010-08-29 19:54:38 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I sometimes think that I might be ready — inwardly, that is — for wealth. Granted, it would be a daunting challenge to hold onto one’s real treasure while managing the allure of excess; but whenever the idea occurs to me, my answer is usually, “bring it on — I’m prepared.”

And then I see a scene such as Bubba Watson’s mean-spirited spout at a golf fan yesterday. Watson, for those unfamiliar with the game, is a long-hitting lefthander who recently lost a playoff for the PGA Championship. So he was teeing off at 17 yesterday at the multi-millionaires’ Barclays tournament (only the top 125 players are invited, and all of them are winners or consistent top-10 players who have amassed fortunes playing this game), and as his ball settled into the middle of the fairway some 300 yards away, he turned toward the group of fans behind the tee and snarled at one of them: “you just HAD to start walking while I was trying to hit?”

This guy was ranting on one of the fans whose presence is responsible for the fact that is he filthy rich while playing a game that most of us pay good money to enjoy. It was a stern reminder of the arrogance that so often is the death hiding within the Trojan horse of excess. Every one of these players on the PGA Tour behaves the same way — they are as quick with the evil eye toward their patrons as they are in pocketing the bankrolls being served them by the corporations behind the tournaments, equipment manufacturers, and miscellaneous advertisers. Watson’s behavior is quite typical of all his brethren among the country club elite. I turned off the video feed in disgust.

Incredibly, it has not occurred to a single one of these privileged little boys that it is the presence of those people who dare to walk, take pictures, or make small noises that has brought them everything they have. If I were one of these players, I would vow never to forget that, and I would give them back the only thing an athlete can offer his audience: respect.

I’m not talking about simply putting up with it; that would be a churlish acceptance, not respect. I would honor the fans’ presence by making it part of the focus of my preparation. I would practice — on the driving range, putting green, and in practice rounds on the course — with a group of folks around me snapping pictures, talking, moving, doing all the ordinary things that people do when they are outdoors on a weekend having fun. I would constantly remind myself that if my concentration and focus are so tentative and fragile as to collapse because someone near me moves a little, I am not yet a true professional. I would spend some time at pro baseball games, and observe how a hitter facing a 95 mph fastball coming toward him must focus amid the noise and movement of 40,000 fans, not to mention the often-intentional distractions of noise and movement from the opposing players in the field. Above all, I would do what I could to adjust my game to the presence of those fans who are largely responsible for my fabulous wealth and fortune.

Instead, however, they behave — all of them, from Tiger on down to the the kids who finish in the top-20 eight times a year or so and thus become millionaires by losing well — they all collectively behave, I say, like a toddler whose favorite toy has been taken away. Wealth and privilege have a way of inciting regression and reversing every natural movement toward maturity.

They also appear to make us stupid. Mind you, I have never been anything of the remotest resemblance to wealthy (except, of course, in comparison with the vast majority of the population of the so-called developing nations, otherwise known as more than half the Earth). I am merely drawing conclusions from observed experience. So when I say “stupid,” I am not talking about an intellectual failing, but a dearth of common sense, of imagination, of a real vision of one’s place within the whole as a unique but single individual. I am talking, in a word, about humility.

Wealth and privilege seem to comprise the drone missile that kills natural intelligence and humility, while also destroying or embittering other members of the family of the human self — respect for others, the senses of dignity and restraint, and the recognition that one’s wealth is part of a beneficent whole that is meant to be shared. The stupidity of excess always forgets or denies this gift-nature of fortune, marks its bounty as its own doing, and guards it like a hellhound. The gift then become a gilded corpse, and its owner a one-eyed brute for whom charity is nothing more than a mechanical, tax-deductible reflex.

Leaving the golf course, we learn today from Frank Rich that the myopic vision of wealth and its hatred-reflex toward those who are not of the country club is the prevailing darkness of the current political landscape. Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and Dick Armey represent the same churlish xenophobia toward anyone off their narrow pedestal of excess as I see among the millionaires of golf. These political owners of Washington and its media treat the commons of their world in the same way those golfers treat their fans: use them, put them on display along the roped-off fairways of the golf course or the Washington Mall or the tea party convention, and above all, collect their money. But when it comes down to brass tacks, stick them all as painfully as possible: kill Social Security, unemployment benefits, and brand everything that may help them a Hitlerian brand of Socialism, all in the name of helping Glenn Beck “reclaim the civil rights movement.” As the Times’ Charles Blow asked yesterday in an extraordinarily lucid piece, “from whom?
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One footnote on the golf side of this business, which is ironically not as clear an illustration of our theme as one might think. After a final round of 67 (again, for the benefit of non-golfers, anything in the 60′s is a very good score for a pro), Tiger said, and I quote, “a lot of positive things happened for me this week…” Obviously, he did not mean, “hey, I got divorced — cool!” Nevertheless, having been through such an experience myself (um, I mean divorce, not shooting in the 60′s), there is a certain sense of purgation, of turning a page, to the moment when a judge’s stamp is placed onto a document that finalizes the failure of a marriage. Beyond that, I cannot speak for Tiger, only for myself: divorce is a teacher, a grape of misery which must be squeezed for all the vintage of learning that it offers. If I were Tiger’s counselor, I would encourage him not to turn his back on that moment, but to drain that cup of suffering completely, and then let it go. I’m not sure he would understand, but he is fortunate in having the model of his ex-wife’s behavior, which has been exemplary (and why haven’t I heard a single sports commentator in the media say it?). Children — even very young ones — can sense how we handle adversity, and so the importance of a man’s reaction to such a moment is redoubled. In the way of Nature, learning is meant to be transmitted in the same manner as wealth: accepted as a gift, and then shared.

Geekday: Googizon and the Empty Threat of Techno-Feudalism

Last modified on 2010-08-28 22:29:45 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Technorati’s very good at telling you what your blog is worth (it’s based on traffic, Google page ranking, trackbacks, and content volume); what they don’t mention is how to go about finding a buyer. The other intriguing question raised by that item is: what actually gets bought when someone buys a blog? Presumably all the content (the database and everything in it), the domain name, any advertising contracts, and I suppose copyrights. At 8 grand, that last one would be a sticking point for me, which raises one of the more ironic controversies of the 21st century: the rise of IP (Internet Protocol) has turned IP (Intellectual Property) into a roaring, hideously complex dragon, and the only winners in this scenario are the lawyers.

Yet as I’ve mentioned many times during discussions of capitalism in general, it is not money that warps and poisons people and their inventions; it is rather the Cult of Excess, which is itself fueled by a fundamentalist fear — the belief in Lack (I can never have enough because there never is enough). Greed may beget complacency, but its engine is fear.

The Internet began simply and in relative anonymity: a bunch of scientists and academics sharing notes over computers joined by telephone lines. Nothing that would attract the attention of corporations, magnates, media celebrities, or government. Or course, corporations and government were involved: Bell’s labs and Xerox’s research facilities, along with the US Dept. of Defense were either funding or providing space and bandwidth. But it was quiet, experimental — the product of lonely propellor heads in denim rather than MBA marketers in three-piece suits. The government knew that geeks had helped before in improving the arts of war and espionage; and the corporations knew that technology often made fabric containing golden threads with commercial potential. The Internet began as this quiet and tentative experiment: just a simple and effective new way for geeks to communicate. Nothing special or exclusive about it.

And now we have a situation where money, which already controls the access that site owners have to the public, is now threatening to make that control bi-directional. If Google and Verizon have their way, the public will be under the heel of money in its access to the Internet’s content. As always with such corporate-fed takeovers, everything is smiley-faced and loaded with complacent assurance: don’t be afraid, we’re not doing anything insidious here; the darkness is all in your poor, overwrought imagination. We’re just making layers — you know, like on a cake. And it will be a beautiful cake, as pretty and harmless as Chelsea’s wedding ($5M and no, you weren’t invited).

What Goog-izon wish to make feudal and exclusive is wireless access, which is where they see the future of computing and the Internet. They appear to think that the PC desktop and home laptop will go dinosaur in favor of smartphones and iPad-like devices. So let’s leave the question of whether preferred access to the rich is permissible in that airy realm, because if you’ve read anything at all here, you know my answer to that one already; and focus instead on Goog-izon’s guiding assumption. Are they right?

Goog-izon’s vision seems to be of a future in which folks with old, “wired” tech can have the same level of access to their plebeian content as the wealthy have to their exclusive content. Everyone gets what they deserve according to what they are worth, not according to who they are. This is the guiding principle of Feudalism, its public face, and it has been so since ancient times. The hierarchy is for everyone’s benefit; the guiding presence of the Nobility is there for the good of all. It is the golden shower vision of trickle-down economics, which existed centuries before Ron Reagan was a trickle in his Daddy’s member.

It is a typically corporate world-view, because it is pathologically myopic: it so narrows the focus as to make a private obsession into a public vision. It is the same myopia that defines the message of Wall Street and its investment bankers: of course we don’t need regulation; what, after all, have we done that would require regulation? Just leave this to us — we’ll manage it so everyone benefits (never mind that their view of both “everyone” and “benefit” is limited to about 150,000 people out of a nation of 300 million).

Here’s an alternative prediction: the PC and the wired web are not going away, not retreating — not in my lifetime, certainly, and probably not even within this century. For one thing, there is the EITR issue of our time (that’s Elephant In The Room), global warming. Johann Hari’s recent review of this issue, which I would consider required reading for anyone with the mildest interest in the future of humanity at large, reveals the fissile speed at which this catastrophe is moving.

Bringing that down to the comparatively mundane level of our discussion here, it’s simple: wireless access will become ever more unreliable and sporadic on a planet choking on atmospheric carbon. I would bet a large sum that Russians with wired connections had a much easier time getting the word out about their disastrous summer than those braving the smoke-filled outdoors and its wireless currents.

The other factor here is about the devices: just because something is smaller does not make it more eco-friendly. Smartphones and iPads are throw-away devices, much more so than the PC. I have a decade-old PC and a four year old laptop which will perform virtually as well over a wired connection as the latest and hottest thing from Apple or Dell. To get them to do the same thing over wireless, I’d have to supply them with routers, 802.11n modems, and signal boosters, not to mention the necessary channels and ISP access accounts.

But that’s what it’s all about, you say: only those who can afford new tech and exclusive access to preferred channels can do wireless well. Again, there is more to that than meets the myopic eye. Which brings us to the second EITR, the global economy. As Krugman and others have pointed out in the past week, there is no recovery. People at large are spending less, and the wealthy (especially the corporations) are hoarding money. We are entering — environmentally, economically, and even technologically — an extended time of constriction, impoverishment, disparity, and revolution. There will be a broad rejection of the narrow consumerism that Goog-izon and its ilk wish to perpetuate, because experience will demonstrate all too clearly that we can no longer afford it, no matter how wealthy or otherwise we may be. Wordsworth’s famous protest — “the world is too much with us…getting and spending” — will be seen as prophetic.

The last factor is purely psychological: we can no more afford the psychology of a wireless technocracy than we can afford its Draconian and inevitably impractical economic and environmental demands. On my new assignment in academia, I’ve been to at least a dozen meetings and have yet to see anyone pull out a Blackberry and start spinning the dial with that blank stare that used to make me think I might as well have been in a padded cell as a corporate boardroom. I cannot express how psychologically refreshing and uplifting an experience this has been; to connect with people on the level of their human immediacy rather than their techno-distractions. I think people will realize — perhaps have already begun to realize — that being strung out on a smartphone or a pad is life-killing and demeaning of human dignity. I remain confident in the ability of human feeling and reason whenever these functions are allowed to co-exist in equality: people will reject being the slaves of these wireless devices just as they rejected the corporate pager in the 80′s.

That brings us back to Goog-izon’s obsession, which they style as vision: once you examine its assumptions, it is empty of all meaning and value except, of course, as an insular and solipsistic matter of material self-interest. These corporations wouldn’t recognize equality if it jumped up and bit their balls off (and again, it will).

So, shall we feel threatened or fearful over Goog-izon’s insidious assault on Net Neutrality, on equal access to the web? No: that would merely be entering their home stadium, playing on their turf. They want you to feel threatened and fearful: that’s their bread and butter, not yours. If the past three years of recession, economic collapse, and the continuing damage to the human ecosphere have not shown us, with unmistakable clarity, the depravity and heart-dead corruption of the market-obsessed mind that pervades both the corporate world and the palaces of the State, then they have taught us nothing. The Internet is a place where the supreme value of the unique individual is affirmed through his connection with the universal, with the global community; where that universal is revealed and extended through the principle of equality among individuals. Corporations and governments should have, as they did at the beginning of the Internet, a peripheral, supporting, and incidental place amid that greater reality.

If you can understand that inviolate reality, and affirm your own place within it, then you have nothing to fear from Goog-izon or its myopic vision of who you are or what the future will be like. A king can make a feudal realm out of a hamlet, a town, or even a great city or nation; but he cannot make the entire world his slave.

Exeunt Two Old Men

Last modified on 2010-08-18 04:04:25 GMT. 10 comments. Top.

I think if I were allowed the proverbial 15 minutes of fame to teach my culture something rare and valuable, it would be about the essential value of silence, the ever-increasing dividend paid out to a regular investment of reflection and meditation. As I have learned time and again over the years — more often the hard way than not — silence is the light that disperses the noise of conflict, that cuts the fuse of confrontation. There is nothing so productive of growth and preventive of error as a clear, quiet inner space.

I was reminded of this over the weekend because a pitcher on one of our local baseball clubs here in New York was placed in an “anger management” program after attacking an in-law and spending a night in the pokey for the assault. Given our culture’s monkeys-at-typewriters approach to the English language, the clumsiness of the term is no cause for surprise, but in the healthy psyche anger doesn’t need to be “managed,” merely acknowledged and released; and sometimes firmly, clearly expressed. Our problem is that we more often tend to express anger only after it has been twisted into ego-rage. Anger is not evil or unnatural; but letting it fester and rot into rage is dysfunctional. This is the meaning of the old Chinese poet’s advice, “Manage trouble before it becomes troublesome.”

In today’s American culture — particularly among our media — such advice, combined with $2.25, will get you a ride on the New York City subway. No one wants to hear anymore about the value of silence, the practical benefit of inward-turning. If you’re worth something to the society — as an athlete, entertainer, political figurehead, or media celebrity — then time and a few sessions with a cheap shrink ought to be enough to bring you back into the fold, whether you’re a racist who makes movies, a golfer or politician with a “sexual addiction,” or a baseball player who’s just rearranged his father-in-law’s face. It’s not really a matter of “anger management,” but image management. The real work of personal transformation has no use or meaning to our ego-drunk culture. We would sooner cover our errors with noise and smoke than listen quietly to the lessons they bear.

In our society, action — no matter how ill-advised, brutish, ignorant, or destructive — is preferable to reflection. Talk, and especially opinion — no matter how foolish, superficial, shrill, vain, or deaf to reality — is preferable to thought. If you’re proven to be wrong, that can always be managed — that is, forgotten — with time and a new pile of noise to drown the memory of yesterday’s errant bluster. Just turn on your television or peruse the day’s Politico, Time, or Washington Post and you’ll have a nausea-inducing pile of examples of what I’m talking about here. In fact, Greenwald recently found a sterling instance of this in the Atlantic.

Our culture’s lust-affair with noise and shrill melodrama has cost us dearly. Our government wastes precious energies, lives, and resources on wars and a vast cult of secrecy and tax cuts for the mega-rich while our infrastructure crumbles to dust, poverty rages through the cities of the wealthiest nation on Earth, and the trunk of the tree of democracy rots before our eyes. Our media waste their constitutional mission, not to mention the time and patience of the public, with mindless debates about mosques and gay marriage and whether the unemployed are social parasites — issues over which there should be not debate but laughter in a truly free and awake society — while real journalism is pushed to the most outlying margins of the Internet (Wikileaks).

Over the past six years, I and my co-writer Terry McKenna have tried to present an alternative to the prevailing reflex noise-response of our society, whose rule is only proven by its occasional and sporadic exceptions in our media and blogosphere. That is, we have attempted to provide opinion based on reflection, an occasional cup of insight drawn from the well of silence. As divergent as we might sometimes appear in our political leanings, Terry and I are both quiet, thoughtful fellows who have no use for the mental knee-jerk of bombast and aggression that dominates the punditry of our culture’s media kings and insiders.

From the standpoint of substance, I think we have succeeded in what we set out to do here. I invite any passing ghost or cricket (that is, our regular readers) to review our archives here and at the previous site to form his own impression on that point. But that hardly matters except to us, because, from the standpoint of “putting fannies in the seats,” to quote the late George Steinbrenner, we have failed. This 21st century Internet simply isn’t our venue, it seems. We might have done well in finding a large and appreciative audience a century or two ago in that lost era of ink, paper, and community; but here and now, we are like the sound of the Earth turning in space — very real, yet ignored by everyone.

Terry’s already made his decision — he’s an artist, a gardener, and a family man with better things to do with his non-working hours than blogging to ghosts and crickets. There is no price that can be put on what Terry has added to this blog — which is a good thing, because he hasn’t made a nickel from it. In fact, like me he’s spent a fair bit of his own time and dough on this poor flightless bird of ours. So Terry has wisely chosen sanity over blogging to the cyber-crickets.

Now it’s my turn. The hosting fees are due next month, and I had been leaning toward paying them and keeping this going, my excuse being that I use the host’s storage space for personal backup as well as for this blog. But that’s a lame, shallow excuse — I have plenty of backup options going already (I recommend Mozy, which offers unlimited storage at $5 per month), and I now realize that I have already said everything of any use that I have to offer the public in this space.

Meanwhile, life is intervening — the boss has me on notice that nights and weekends will be de rigeur for a while as the deadline on the university’s new website nears, and my kid will soon be returning to school. Trigonometry was never a subject dear to my heart, but I will need to re-acquaint myself with it well enough to tutor in this discipline. Add to this the fact that I need to keep looking for work: the gig I’m on now may take me through October, and I doubt the economy will have improved much by then.

Then there is that silence: she calls me back; a certain quiet urgency is in her voice. When you’re not working, she is right at hand, easy to find and explore, to rest beside when friends and acquaintances of better times have all become too busy or distant for your company. But amid the workaday world, another change occurs: that reflective presence, that eye within the storm, becomes more compressed and elusive. I cannot allow myself, least of all at this time of life, to become estranged from that presence and its sure and gentle leadership.

Writing reviews or opinion of any sort and in any forum — yes, even in the cheetohs-stained keyboard universe of the blogosphere — is not a piece of cake (nor, in fact, a bag of cheetohs). To do it correctly, as we have frequently done it here, requires preparation, research, self-examination, work, and re-work. Your first response to events is rarely your best one. In fact, you would be perfectly justified in saying that to do this stuff for as long as we have done it, utterly without remuneration, borders on the insane. At best, it resides well within the territory of folly. We offer no defense of ourselves on that point. We may learn late, but we do learn.

And anyway, as I have mentioned before, I can no more stop writing than I can stop breathing or defecating. I have two unfinished books that have been lying around for months, and they, too, are calling for some attention. Granted, selling a book in this culture and this economy is, even for an accomplished author, to play blackjack odds. For one like me, it’s more like trying the one-armed bandit. Nevertheless, that still beats the prospect of making money on a blog, which is the statistical equivalent of a dollar on the $100M Powerball.

I think I speak for both of us, however, in maintaining that there are no regrets. We have accomplished something substantive and meaningful here, even if it lacks both popular appeal and temporal duration. The successful life faces its accomplishments as it does its errors: you learn from them, let them go, and move on.

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I recently renewed the domain name, so I’m willing to sell that to anyone interested for $20, which is the price I paid for a fresh year’s renewal. As for our content, it will disappear once the web host terminates their service next month. I have database backups, so nothing will be lost, but only made inaccessible to the public. I am reminded in that respect of Stephen Hawking’s metaphorical description of the apparitional “loss of light” at the event horizon of a black hole: he compared the phenomenon to the burning of an encyclopedia — no data are really lost, but they are so transformed as to become impossible to read, inaccessible to the consciousness that could once understand and appreciate the encyclopedia before it became a bundle of ash. This, incidentally, is how I often think of death. As Chuang Tzu once said, “the wood is gone but the fire burns on, and we do not know when or how it will all end.” Or if it will.

Farewell then, blogosphere: these two old men leave you in head-scratching wonderment, but with best wishes nonetheless. May you evade the death-grip of corporate Power, Orwellian lockstep, and big media control; and continue to sing, gravel-throated and usually out of tune, to the freethinking plasma universe.

Golf in the Kingdom (of Hell)

Last modified on 2010-08-17 11:48:23 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
– Mark Twain

One of the things I love about the game of golf is its bizarre etiquette, which is woven amid a tangle of rules that are sometimes gutbustingly hilarious. On Sunday, some of that charming idiocy of our beloved game was on display at the highest levels of its professional arena. But first, some background for non-golfers.

Many a comic has asked the question: in what other game can a white guy dress up like a pimp and perform the devotions of a Druidic priest? Golf is the worship of Nature done in neon polyester. Consider this, for instance: the rules of the game tell me that I cannot dare to touch, either with my hands or my golf club, the floor of a sand pit commonly known as a sand trap or bunker. Yet etiquette strongly enjoins that, whenever I find my ball within such a pit, I must carefully rake the sand after I have played. In what other game would an area known as a “hazard” be primped and combed like a starlet’s hair or the coat of one’s favorite toy poodle? I say again: in what other game would you pay $60 – $1,000 a round to manicure the base of a pit; to fix dents in the grass that your ball makes when it falls onto the green; to carefully replace and arrange carved-up bits of earth and grass into the place from which they were disturbed?

Perhaps you’ve already heard about Sunday’s story: a powerful young man named Dustin Johnson hit his ball on the last hole of the tournament into one of those sand pits. Now this particular pit was so far off the charted realm of the ordinary course that it had been left to the vagaries of rake-less chance and the ministrations of the fan-mob that was putatively observing the activities of Johnson and his millionaire colleagues. In one such remote pit, a woman was building sand castles with her child; other pits were occupied by beach chairs, blankets, and towels.

So young Johnson arrives in search of his golf ball, wending his way through the crowd that more resembles the human sea at Coney Island Beach on a July Sunday than an audience of golf fans. He arrives at said pit containing his golf ball. The pit is surrounded by a wall of people several layers deep: there has been a visitation from the gods, an incursion from the stars of heaven into their remote and disordered corner of Hell. They all want to see it, the closer the better. Their bodies blot out the edges of the bunker; their shadows drape the entire area in semi-darkness.

Meanwhile, young Dustin’s caddy is very busy: this is uncharted territory and determining a yardage from this god-forsaken place to any point back in the proper range of the golf course — let alone the goal of their game, the hole in the distant green — is going to be a nearly insuperable challenge. He somehow manages this task, however, and rushes back, winded, to report his calculations to the boss. He has taken no accounting of the proximate landing of his employer’s wayward flight, only that there remain some two-hundred-odd yards to their goal, with intermediate points duly noted. It is the servant’s place to know everything about his master, but not to see everything.

Most of us know what happened next: Dustin took some practice swings amid the sandy desolation of this pit, set his club down behind the ball, and delivered his blow. Soon after, he has made a bogey to put him into a tie for the lead and a three-way playoff.

But a fat old fellow in a suit that would make a used car salesman blush is waiting for him like Dante’s Guide or Faust’s damnation. Dustin has violated one of the cardinal laws of his profession: he has allowed his golf club to touch the floor of Hell, and now he must suffer the penalty. Two strokes, which knocks him out of both lead and playoff, into fourth place and a punitive prize of $270,000 — more money than I have made these past five years combined. TV commentators somberly term the entire scene a “Shakespearian tragedy” (I’m not making that up — I watched and I heard that phrase several times): as Twain also reminded us, people lack the mildest sense of proportion.

George Carlin once recommended that the greatest balm toward the removal of poverty in our nation would be for the government to take over all the cemeteries and golf courses in the nation and build low-income housing units on them all. Dustin — a man, by the way, with a perfect name for a sport in which good housekeeping melds with brute athletic force meted out in ghetto attire — would be among Wisconsin’s first eager volunteers in such a worthy enterprise.

No One Goes Over That Bridge, It’s Too Crowded

Last modified on 2010-08-15 02:44:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s comparison of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. I took a walk to downtown Brooklyn today and thought I’d have a look at the bridge. The walkway was mobbed, and because it’s still divided in half between a bicycle and pedestrian lane, it was clearly dangerous today. Cyclists here in New York behave pretty much like our motorists do: drive like hell in whatever lane is open for the next second and it’s the pedestrian’s job to stay out of the way. So I stopped long enough to get a picture and then turned tail. Here’s a comparison photo: BB on the left on Saturday, MB on the right at the height of Friday’s rush hour. Granted, not identical conditions, but rush hour is always busy on the BB during the week, with Wall Street workers walking home to their downtown Brooklyn condos, along with the usual crowd of tourists. So even given the different times, these images are fairly revealing of a genuine disparity.

A Panegyric for the Manhattan Bridge

Last modified on 2010-08-14 06:07:20 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I took a walk home from work on Friday evening, from the Village to the south end of Prospect Park in Brooklyn (it’s only 7 miles, just a relaxing stroll for me). The shortest route was over the Manhattan Bridge, the old blue monster that is the ugly stepsister to the more glamorous and charismatic Brooklyn Bridge. The MB receives far less pedestrian and bicycle traffic than the BB, and walking it gives you all the reasons why. The BB’s pedestrian lane is a promenade — a wide, airy, lovely boardwalk that stretches over the center of the bridge. The MB’s ped lane is half the width of BB’s — a narrow concrete path at the very edge of the bridge that runs beside the tracks for the D and B subway trains. So when you walk over the MB, you feel a little cramped — even though hardly anyone else is there with you — and when those trains go by, you feel the deck that holds you above the East River rumble beneath you, and the fence beside you rattles with a sound like fear.

In fact, walking the MB is a little scary — you can see gaps and holes in the fence big enough for you to slip through. But as you can see from the photographs, it has its rewards. The MB is the bridge that no one looks at; no one admires it. Even the tourists on the BB look the other way, toward the bay where Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty beckon; few pay much attention to the northern prospect and the big blue monster over there. But to my mind, you’re not a New Yorker until you’ve walked the MB — sure it’s ugly, and it’s not a place to be seen. But it gives you a view and feel for this city that its elegant sister can’t match.

Little Great Man

Last modified on 2010-08-13 02:24:12 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In four weeks most Americans will be observing another anniversary of a day and a place whose images still make us shudder. But the WTC was a place that knew many good times before that day — perhaps none more extraordinary than a day in 1974 when a “little” Frenchman staked his claim as the greatest practitioner of his art. Today, he’s right here in Brooklyn, teaching. Yes, you can come to Brooklyn and learn to do what Petit has done all his life — dancing on a string above death. One of the truly amazing artists of our time.

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This old news video (I think that’s a young Roger Mudd there) has more on that day. Listen to what Petit says when they ask him why he did such a thing. They might as well have asked him why he was breathing.

An Open Letter to Omar Khadr

Last modified on 2010-08-12 04:35:12 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“We’re embarrassing ourselves by being here.” (– Omar Khadr to his lawyer).

No, young Omar Khadr, the embarrassment shoe is quite on the other foot — it’s on the foot of the imperialist power that wears the jackboot of Power and presses it into the throats of foreign peoples, expecting them to return the favor with garlands of roses. The embarrassment shoe is worn by the government that tortured you and threatened you with gang rape, and now counts the admission of guilt you made under that torture and that threat as admissible in a so-called court of law.

The embarrassment boot also pushes into the throats and tongues of its own people, including our press. Our once-cherished First Amendment lies tattered and covered with cigarette ash and boot marks and fear. Our press is free to write whatever it pleases, as long as it is pleasing to The Imperial Boot.

Nothing, as you can see, has changed over the past two years, young Omar. Nothing has changed, in fact, since you were a 15 year old boy and supposedly threw a grenade at a solider invading your land (okay, you’re Canadian, but anyway that’s what you admitted to doing after you had been tortured and threatened with gang rape).

What is the truth of what you did or didn’t do before spending 8 years in Gitmo, Omar? Do you really imagine it matters to anyone who matters at all? What matters to us today is how that cool angry guy jumped off the airplane and who might show up at Charlie Rangel’s birthday party and how a person can die during a sauna contest and the Rise of the Tea Party. No one really cares what injustice you have suffered or how the President of the United States is pissing on the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions while shouting out jokes to his friends about drone airstrikes, even as his Mouthpiece spouts FOX News talking points, telling the nation that the “professional left” is on drugs (boy, how I wish I could plead guilty to that).

Nobody gives a damn about what happens to you, Omar. We traded in our ability to care — we gave it up for a promise of safety, a chance to keep our collective nose clean and our ass covered under the gentle umbrella of 24-7-365 surveillance. We gave our First Amendment away for something that is more precious to us: a glowing television in an empty room; a warm cell phone to be the nanny of our desolation; the opportunity to hear and tell lies at town hall meetings and tea parties; the right to live amid the spreading pall of waste in the shadow of the limousine army speeding past on its way from the bank to the palace; the chance to die in both moral and material poverty rather than with the weakest semblance of dignity.

The embarrassment, once again, Omar, is not yours. It is ours. All ours.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Who Won the Golf Tournament?

Last modified on 2010-08-10 02:34:35 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

I wouldn’t feel too bad for young Hunter Mahan if I were you. Sure, he’s getting the short end of the press stick, buried down there in a tiny corner of ESPN’s window, all covered up by images and stories about the other guy who finished third to last in the tournament that Hunter happened to win. Still and all, Hunter got the $1.4M, the trophy, the Ryder Cup team berth sewn up, and all the momentum going into this week’s PGA Championship. Kid’s a pretty good player — too bad all ESPN saw worth mentioning about Sunday’s outcome was about the other fellow eating his humble pie. But I wouldn’t feel too bad for him, either. He’s a billionaire who, like most ultra-wealthy and privileged people, has a fair bit of growing up to do.

In Memory of Tom Little

Last modified on 2010-08-09 09:15:07 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

I just learned that one member of a group of ten humanitarian and medical professionals recently gunned down in cold blood by the Taliban was the brother of a boyhood friend of mine in upstate NY. You can read about his life, service, and local roots here.

This does not change anything about my view of this war and America’s place in it. It just puts a lot of things into their proper perspective. Tom Little’s business, his vocation, was healing, not killing. He happened to have been called to practice his healing art in a place where many others chose to kill — indeed, where war had been the dominant mode of human relationship for as long as anyone could remember.

So let me submit one more time that for a supposedly modern civilization to join a 9th century culture of death in its depredations and match it death for death, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, is not to honor the memories of Tom Little and his colleagues, but to betray them. This war is not some petty game to tell jokes about during White House Correspondents’ Dinners — it is a darkness that is stealing the light of our land.

Tom won’t be — cannot be — replaced. But he can be remembered, and the living example of his life can become a guide to those who wish to be wiser and more human than they have been. To his family I wish what Tom wished for the people of Afghanistan — healing.

While sitting in stillness,
Connect with the Cosmic Harmony.
By clearing the space within,
In steadfast quietude,
Let your true self observe
The numberless compressions of consciousness:
How they arise and recede,
Coming into being and blooming;
Retreating at last toward the Cosmic Origin.

Return to the root, to the primal nature,
Is the way of all beings.
Let your awareness contemplate
The eternal cycle of return,
And your insight will deepen in this.

The understanding that is nurtured
On the dispersion of ignorance
Perpetually broadens its perspective.

To embrace the way of return,
To feel the immutable equality of being,
Nurtures equanimity and justice.

To live in the Tao means abiding in the eternal—
Perceiving completely, with all one’s being:
Life is never exhausted;
It is only delusion that dies.
–Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 16

What’s Good for the Goose…

Last modified on 2010-08-09 01:16:27 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

So what now? Round up all the eagles you can find, gas ‘em and throw them into a landfill? Kill ‘em all?

Ooh, no, we can’t do that — the eagle is our national bird, how dare you suggest such a thing, you lunatic lefty blogger? You imagine that what’s good for the goose is good for the eagle?

Well I guess old Ben Franklin had it right about the turkey — I’ve never heard of a turkey soaring into anyone’s engine. One thing is certain: Franklin’s description of the character of the eagle fairly matches our country’s current moral stature:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

“With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country . . .

Ives: The Unanswered Question

Last modified on 2010-08-08 23:43:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

The American modernist composer Charles Ives is one of two great artists who made their “day job money” in the insurance business (the other is the consummate literary modernist, Franz Kafka, who was a pioneer in worker’s compensation insurance).* Ives is known mainly to musicians and lovers of experimental music, but a few of his works have entered the peripheries of the concert repertoire. One of these is this one, The Unanswered Question. Its programmatic intent is probably best left to each individual’s response to the piece, but Ives did note his revision of the score with some hints.

The trumpet poses the Question, and is answered by the woodwinds of human ego, which distort, malign, and complicate the simple Question over six of its seven repetitions. The final recitation of the Question is “answered” only by the glistening strings, which fade into silence. This is one of those pieces where the performance environment is critical: a conductor onstage will tend to ruin the effect that Ives intended. I saw it done a couple years back at Carnegie Hall by the wonderful conductor-less orchestra Orpheus, and the effect was near-perfect. The woodwind players appeared onstage, slightly off-center, in a pool of light. The rest of the stage was darkened, and there was, of course, no conductor flapping his arms to spoil the moment. The trumpet player was…well, I have no idea where he was. The sound came as if from the lobby, behind the audience. He may have been up in the balcony, and I suspect that he moved between each repetition of his Question. The strings were offstage left, to judge by the sound. The effect of disorientation, mystery, and that haunting quality of an urgent conversation from a dream, came through beautifully. I think Ives would have been pleased.

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*I cannot help but idly wonder: what outstanding visual artist from the insurance industry might come along to make this dyad a trinity? Just a thought for anyone who might happen along here…

The 21st C. Leader: Fencepost on a Broken Road

Last modified on 2010-08-08 21:14:13 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

When you fear a man, you insult him. I wonder if many people can understand this. Once I fear you, I have slandered you. The same is true, incidentally, of God. In every fear there is suspicion: so why would you stain the Beloved with the darkness of your dread? How can you possibly fear and trust; fear and love — at the same time and toward the same Being? It is the height of ideological insanity.

There is much I do not understand about ego, for it both baffles logic and freezes the heart. My worst nightmares are milder than the everyday depredations of human ego. After all, we always do wake up from our dreams.

But it is, of course, the unique function of Art to smudge the line, blur the distinction, and shift the planes of consciousness, tilting one into another like a lava lamp made of dream and reality. In this context, Sirota used a recent movie release to underscore the insidious nature of virtually all political and cultural propaganda; here’s an excerpt:

Many old sci-fi stories, like politics and advertising of the past, subscribed to the “Clockwork Orange” theory that says blatantly propagandistic repetition is the best way to pound concepts into the human brain. But as “Inception’s” main character, Cobb, posits, the “most resilient parasite” of all is an idea that individuals are subtly led to think they discovered on their own.

This argument’s real-world application was previously outlined by Cal State Fullerton’s Nancy Snow, who wrote in 2004 that today’s most pervasive and effective propaganda is the kind that is “least noticeable” and consequently “convinces people they are not being manipulated.”

From our beginnings at this blog nearly six year ago, both of us have focused on this point: the urgency of enhancing the individual’s inner radar for propaganda. We began with fundamentalist propaganda, because that was the defining doublespeak of the Bush era. Today’s propaganda is equally insidious: we have gone from an overtly religious fundamentalism to a calculating intellectualism that is, in many respects, a new religion. The aggressive Democrat is as dangerous a force as the compassionate conservative, and they share their varying shades of darkness. The MBA-level spreadsheet smoothness of Rove was the sinewy muscle of Bush’s evangelistic and irrational arrogance; the oily religiosity of Hope is the emotional fuel of Obama’s hyper-intellectual engine. He is the techno-drone run amok; the Christian soldier who cannot shoot straight. But, like Bush, he is only a fencepost on a dark and broken road, a figurehead of something far more dangerous and pervasive, the illusion of supremacy — the malignant ghost that we call Ego. We can’t kill the institutional apparatus of that ghost; we can only destroy the connection it claims of us.

Once you make the commitment to really deconstruct the vast apparatus of human ego, beginning with yourself, the work is easy in a way. For ego, once you have begun to strip it naked, has the same bubonic body and foul breath, no matter what style or color of ideological clothing it may have adopted as its ornament. My personal approach to the task of exposing propaganda is to attempt to reveal that nakedness of ego, the roots that feed the vast field of weeds. I have quoted Thoreau before in this respect: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” If you can strike at the roots of conditioned belief, you can successfully defend yourself from its poison. It begins from within.

Thus, if we wish to evaluate the punditry of our culture, I feel we had best expose the pundit within ourselves first. For a decade or so, this has been the focus of my own inner work: pulling the black robes off the body of the inner Judge; exposing my identification with Power and its seductive voice of fear and deceit. In that respect, the political is merely the reflection of the personal.

This is the way the ego within works, if you give it a moment’s reflection: ego says things like, “I am only here to protect you,” and “I want to keep you safe, no matter what…” Ego uses a very powerful and compelling rationalism to reinforce fear, a sense of personal inadequacy, and the cults of guilt, duty, and sacrifice. You could with perfect justice say that I have found strains of Krauthammer, Friedman, Kristol, Hannity, even Beck, within myself. To the extent that I have successfully flushed them out of my psyche, I have effectively deconstructed their outer manifestations here as well.

I have also mentioned this before: directly after 9/11, I heard the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh urging Americans to turn inward and kill their own bin Laden before striking out against the one without. It was a message that really stopped me cold at a time when I, like many of us, was burning to see all of Afghanistan turned into a nuclear cinder. Before the fires had gone out in that vast charnel house that to this day is known as Ground Zero, I had unclenched my fists and sought instead to fight the only war worth fighting — the war against ego.

It’s worth fighting because it can be won — not, however, with ease or finality. There is no “mission accomplished” moment in the war on ego. There is only diminishment, a progressive lightening of the load, a clearing of the fog and smoke that once seemed too thick and dark to permit either breath or vision. You can’t free the world from the oppressive and insidious weight of propaganda; you can only free yourself. Each one who undertakes this task and begins his or her journey adds to the health of the whole.

Geekday: The Audacity of Code

Last modified on 2010-08-08 16:09:25 GMT. 3 comments. Top.

So how serious can technology be? It’s all about seeing what new toy Steve Jobs and his Fruity Empire are secretly planning in their Chinese torture chambers, er, Cupertino design studios. Tech never gets more sinister than M$ or Intel twisting the arms of PC suppliers to ensure that competitors are locked out of their action. Well, am I right?

No, I am wrong. We are in the process of witnessing a historic confrontation between a global network of volunteer geeks who keep a little online shop called Wikileaks and the relentless might of the darkest and most powerful death star ever to appear on planet Earth. This death star is five-sided and has more than half a trillion dollars at its command. If you fall even faintly afoul of its lethal eye, you, your family, friends, associates, and home can be vaporized in an instant.

Morrell didn’t say how the U.S. military would respond, if Wikileaks ignores its request. “How do we intend to compel?” he asked. “At this point, we are making a demand of them…If it requires compelling them to do anything, then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing.”

That, my friends, is a death sentence, the same kind of death sentence that hangs over a US citizen accused of Terrorism (maybe justly, maybe not, we can’t know for sure because it’s a case of the government convicting a person without having to show proof of guilt, because the entire Universe is a battlefield from here to Eternity). Meanwhile, all those who the Death Star deems cohorts of Evil will be stopped, frisked, detained, and their equipment confiscated or destroyed. How, you may wonder, can a geek respond to a Death Star whose power cannot possibly be opposed?

The smart geek says, “I see your threat, and I raise you one.” Mr. Assange has just played an incredible gambit: an encrypted file (I dare you, Pentagon — put the smartest guys in the room on this one), containing who knows what more on the Death Star and its operations?

Blackmail? Um, blackmailers are usually after something, and rarely unveil their stash if that something is delivered. But if you’d like to insist that it’s blackmail, then it’s the biggest such case ever, especially considering Wikileaks has already gotten the Pentagon talking a sub-infantile word salad to the entire world (the information is old hat, meaningless, rehashed, dead news, but it’s tippy-top secret leftovers that are Endangering Freedom and we want it all back even though it’s all over the world already).

Here’s another idea: that encrypted file may well be 1.4GB of nothing, meaningless gobbledygook or Lady Gaga videos or the new Linux kernel (2.6.35, for all you Penguin lovers out there), meant simply to keep the Death Star at bay and keep its minions from detaining geeks. If you want to find out what it really is, All-Powerful-Penta-Genie, just decrypt the stinkin’ file, okay? A bunch of oddball geeks have taken on the Uber-Power of the Earth, the Angry God of the Geopolitical Universe and turned it into a wailing toddler that they have turned over their collective knee. In the process, they’ve made a couple of mistakes in both their strategy and their message-handling, but on balance, it has been a worthy and historic lesson to this crumbling, diseased, foul Empire called the United States of America.
_____________________________________________________________

Update: Wikileaks plans to continue publishing more of the same, and is basically telling the Pentagon: go ahead and stop us, many have tried (probably in your hire, many of them). The US wanted to fight a global war, now they’ve got one. What’s their next move, short of a Chinese-style censorship regime? Heh, you tell me.

Etude in F Minor, Op. 10, No. 9

Last modified on 2010-08-05 11:47:17 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

It’s been too long since we had some Chopin, don’t you think? Right now, my kid is studying the Op. 10, No. 9 Etude, and I’ll have a recording of her playing it as soon as I can buy a performance from her (if you think children should not be bribed, you’ve probably never been a parent). For now, the best I can do is Pollini (all seriousness aside, he’s one of the best alive).

A word about this little piece: Chopin was not by any measure a comic composer. But this opening, marked Allegro molto agitato is too frequently played too fast. The image one then gets is of a Charlie Chaplin action scene or, more mundanely, a dog digging furiously for a lost bone throughout the backyard. That is, the molto should support the agitato, not the Allegro. This piece should not remind you of Beethoven’s famous and amusing rage over a lost penny. The Allegro must be controlled, restrained, in order to enhance the emotional sturm character of the entire Etude — that is, the agitato. If the longing within this little dark diamond does not come through, it comes off sounding false and weak.

The other notable feature of this piece is one of my favorite Chopin attributes: the guy just had a beautiful feeling for endings. This brief but intense storm subsides over the three final measures in a plaintive whisper marked leggierissimo (extremely lightly) and smorzando (dying away suddenly) in a ppp dynamic (softest possible). As is often the case with Chopin, the left hand creates the poetic mood while the right hand delivers the drama, the pathos. Technically, this is one of Chopin’s easier Etudes, but artistically, interpretively, it is one of his most challenging.

______________________________________________

Ashkenazy also delivers an excellent performance of this Etude. Incidentally, if you’re looking for classical music options on the web, check this out. You have to read through the comments, because they’re from geeks, and they have lots of ideas.

Ordinary Wisdom

Last modified on 2010-08-04 01:43:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Sometimes, I am sure, you get fed up with the Intarwebs and all the foul and useless garbage amid its depths (and again, I say it’s a swamp within a rainforest, not, as Friedmania says, a “sewer”). So I like to highlight some of the crystalline beauty I occasionally find here. It’s especially satisfying when it comes from ordinary people who you’ve never heard of, like “cincinnatus,” who delivered this comment at Greenwald’s blog this evening:

Freedom comes with risks. Life is a risk. You can’t live life by trying to kill everything that scares you.

An A for Bloomberg

Last modified on 2010-08-03 21:25:27 GMT. 6 comments. Top.

Our mayor here, of whom we’ve been somewhat critical from time to time, deserves vast credit for his outspoken defense of the mosque being planned for the “Ground Zero” area here in downtown Manhattan.

What is really of note is not the mere defense of the project, but the grounds on which he defended it. He chose a purely constitutional basis for his argument, and that places him far above most American politicians (including, once again, the President). Bloomberg cited this as a test of the separation of church and state, and of the Constitution’s prohibition of state interference with the private property of citizens.

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

As I believe both of us have pointed out here at one time or another, the Constitution is far from a perfect document. But it’s what we have, and, with all its defects and anachronisms, it’s the best defense we have to support our survival as a nation. I just hope the mayor remembers that fact, and his own spirited defense of the Constitution today, the next time a political convention is held here and he feels tempted to sign off on police state tactics against both peaceful protesters and innocent citizens.

Our Heightened Sensitivity

Last modified on 2010-08-03 15:45:26 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

If laughter is the best medicine, then the daily newspaper is your prescription. Consider the remark in today’s Times cover story about how the ethics charges against black, Democratic Congressmen are a sign of “Washington’s heightened sensitivity to indiscretions.”

BWAAA-HAHAHAHAHA-HAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!

Does it have to be said that your average Washington insider is about as “sensitive” as a bean bag chair filled with anvils? Except, of course, when it’s time for…VACATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, what to do with all this heightened sensitivity? Everyone has played, all shall have prizes. Your corporate Masters know your deepest sensitivities, even better than God! You, a beach pass on the Riviera — don’t forget the sun block! Ah, Senator, you’ve earned something befitting your station: a round of golf at Augusta National, and we’ve managed to arrange it so that your bag will be carried by that page you’ve had your eye on for so long, heh, heh. Oh, and you — we know your sensitivities very, very well — third stall from the right at the airport men’s room — make the secret foot sign and you’ll find a young man in there who will give you a night you won’t soon forget. Your sensitivities will be so heightened they might never come back down!

Everybody have fun — that’s what leadership is all about! And don’t forget to take a scoop of Viagra from the candy bowl on the way out. See you in a month or so — and remember, there’s no such thing as indiscretion as long as you don’t get caught! Stay sensitive, my friends…

Police State: The More Things Change

Last modified on 2010-08-02 18:43:39 GMT. 5 comments. Top.

Chris Hedges has read the 400+ page FBI file on Howard Zinn and compressed it all into a chilling web article. Excerpt:

“Mass murders occur, which is what war is,” Zinn, who was a bombardier in World War II, said in 1972, according to the file, “because people are split and don’t think … when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn’t deserve to be obeyed. … To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government.”

I’ll have more on the American police state as the week goes along, but for now I’ll leave you with a single question: why isn’t this on the front page of every newspaper in the country? Oh, you’re right: there is nothing new in this information — everyone knows we have a police state. Yes, it’s all old news, ancient history. You know: if it happened in my lifetime, it’s got to be from when the dinosaurs roamed America. But, old and boring as it is, it endangers our troops and puts lives at risk. If you dare to read or talk about this old news, you are a friend of The Enemy. We’ll be watching you…

Doublespeak Update: When I say I am finished with something, I usually mean I’m done. The job’s complete and I’ve taken my resources elsewhere. That’s sort of what “finished” means in that context. Then again, I don’t work in government, where it is said, “we’re finished, job successfully completed, all resources to be called back and reassigned…except the 50,000 that are staying.”

Here’s a question: why bother to use language anymore at all? I mean, wouldn’t grunts and stamping of feet accomplish just as much, given the depths that doublespeak has now reached?

A Tiger in Your Bank

Last modified on 2010-08-01 16:44:14 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

We spill a few occasional droplets of ink here over the excesses of tech giants, so it seems only fair to note this graphic from the Atlantic on where the world’s big money really goes. Incidentally, the massive disparity between revenue and profit from the monster that pays no taxes is kind of suspicious: poor management, shady accounting, or merely a reflection of the fact that humankind has hit a practical, economic, and technological limit on the extraction of this shit?

The Winged Insurgents of Prospect Park

Last modified on 2010-08-01 17:05:40 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Well, after everything that’s happened, what do you imagine I found during today’s walk in the park? (and how can you not love their sense of order?)

I say it again, for what must be the five hundredth time: you can kill and kill and kill and kill — ad nauseam, ad infinitum, until your whole world is a charnel house and you walk amid the stench of death — but Nature keeps regenerating, keeps challenging your cult of death with a stream of life.

Sure you can fight it — you can tell Nature that you are its Master, and quote your foolish scripture to that purpose (“…fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground”*). Ha! Nature laughs! That is its way, that is how it mourns all those you have killed. That is how it endures. It keeps restoring life while you destroy; it brings light while you wrap yourself in your darkness; it rains benevolence while you wallow in your mudpit of fear and cynicism. So why would you fight a battle you can only lose? Isn’t that to touch the extreme limit of stupidity?

Nature carries no grudges, exacts no punishments, seeks no revenge. Only human ego does those things. The universe is constantly presenting us with a single question: can you drop your tribal fantasy of mastery and control and simply participate in the harmony? Would you have Nature as a partner in living or as an enemy in death? I cannot give you the answer, it says, nor can your dark and distant God tell you it — or if it seems to, it will be a false and arrogant answer. The most crucial choices are made not in the ideological spreadsheet of the cerebral cortex; they are worked out in the silence of the independent heart.

The geese I saw in the pond today were not crying “Death to Bloomberg!” or petitioning for the revenge of their 400 brethren who, last month, were taken, gassed, and thrown into a landfill with human garbage. They were merely living according to their own clear and modest lights. As I looked out at them, I wondered: is there a wisdom in them that I share, but have obscured with the shroud of fear and the dark crown of thought?

I do not have the answer to that; but the mere question is as precious to me as life. And since no one is reading here, I will offer this declaration amid the stark privacy of anonymity: to ask such a question is, however faintly, however ineffably, to touch the enduring harmony.

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*Gen. 1:28

Police State Update: Tyrant-o-Saurus Wrecks

Last modified on 2010-07-31 17:22:13 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

In good comedy there is always great truth. Carlin, Stewart, and Colbert have antecedents that go back to the dawn of western history — just this past week, Jason Linkins pointed us back toward Aristophanes in his discussion of the “war helps women” formula being spread about on Time cover stories and elsewhere.

The tradition of comedic insight is fairly continuous in our history. As our military prepares to draw and quarter the man who will no doubt become its Wikileaks lamb, the words of one of our foremost comic geniuses come to mind: “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”

Groucho Marx would have found Admiral Mike Mullen’s comments, that Julian Assange has “blood on his hands” a projection of such profound and substanceless idiocy as to be perfectly minted comic currency. Will Rogers once pointed out that being a political humorist is effortless work: you merely listen to the voice of Power and you have all the material you need.

Julian Assange and his global team of volunteers caught the Obama administration, the corporate media, imperial history’s most powerful military juggernaut, and the vast universe of triple-chinned, double-jowled punditry with its pants at its collective ankles. That was his unforgivable sin. If he has “blood on his hands,” it is not physical blood, but the blood of ego.

But let us cut the military a little slack here, put it into perspective: the reality of the police state is not centered on the military — it is only one of many appliances in tyranny’s kitchen. The FBI, for over a century, has been the primary domestic arm of the police state in America. Consider, for instance, that Howard Zinn — a peaceful man of ideas who also fought in one of our nation’s wars — was the subject of surveillance for a quarter century. For his admirers, this only enhances Zinn’s achievements, his salient contribution to civilization and the evolution of humanity.

Yet as citizens and more practically as taxpayers, we must ask: is this what we want to be paying for — a corporate-controlled imperial government and a domestic surveillance police state that throws our money into a fire that only warms the bones of professional comedians? Think that point over as you watch Stewart do what all the rest of the voices in our media cannot:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Best Leak Ever
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

33 Home Roids for A-Rod

Last modified on 2010-07-30 04:48:42 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

So you think this blogger’s tough on the players of the political arena? Check out ESPN, the Disney-fied monster of sports media, taking away 33 HRs from A-Rod. I guess it’s ESPN’s calculation of the ‘roid effect: 566 of those HRs were home runs, but those other 33 were home roids. Tough luck, A-Rod, maybe next year. I guess you might say it’s an upside-down world at Disney…

Geekday: Why E-Books Matter

Last modified on 2010-07-30 02:31:24 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Hello there geeks and geekettes. We’ll scrawl a few lines on the e-book passion now overtaking our world, but first a brief browser roundup:

Firefox 4 has entered its second beta, and they can count me a happy camper. I’ve been using it every day for three weeks now, and have had one crash. Otherwise, very consistent performance, rendering, and plugin reliability. When it comes to extensions, features, convenience, and support for third party applications, Mozilla just gets it. So far, my only complaint is that the ingenious “Apptab” feature, which allows you to make a fixed mini-tab based on a site’s favicon, doesn’t persist between sessions. They’re very handy if (like me) you commonly spread 15 or 20 tabs across your typical browser session. You can set a few of your most-used tabs as apptabs. Before FF4 goes live, the Mozilla geeks will need to ensure that one’s apptabs stick around from session to session.

There’s a new Safari too (Mac users need to run Software Update and expect to have to endure a system restart) — unfortunately, Safari 5.0.1 misses the target here. It came with some ballyhooed extensions; but on my first try at the Apple extensions universe I got a Webkit error, followed swiftly by a Flash plugin failure. Most of the extensions I eventually tried (once the browser decided to work again) just added toolbar-type lines to the window, which is not a very efficient way to design browser extensions. Maybe Apple’s just too busy piling up money to really pay much attention to software development and testing…

Google isn’t standing still either — Chrome will now receive a fresh update every six months. It’s now my browser of choice at work (yes, they let you download stuff where I work), because it’s still the leanest and fastest performer among the top web browsers. If you have older, slower hardware (like many new hires, I’m on a loaner IBM Thinkpad T42 with an M processor and half a gig of RAM — a great old machine, mind you, but not exactly 21st century) — Chrome is an excellent choice. I also run it on my decade-old P4 box here at home over Texstar’s marvelous PC Linux OS.

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The big geek news of the moment is the release of a new and cheaper Kindle. The new $139 budget model comes with Wifi only (the more expensive ones still ship with bundled G3 access and an account). But the focus here needs to be the phenomenon rather than this or that company’s exploitation of it. E-readers are winning for very good reasons:

1. They pay for themselves in no time and are a bargain. You buy ten or a dozen e-books over hardcover, you’ve made back what you paid for the device. After that, it’s all savings.
2. The convenience factor is nearly as big: carrying a single device rather than a satchel full of books goes beyond monetary value.
3. Space is not only the final frontier, it’s also a limited one for most of us. If I can do without a six foot bookshelf laden with 80 lbs. of books in favor of a Kindle, a Nook, or whatever, I’ve gained room for living.
4. I saved the best for last: searchability. The best and most detailed index sometimes just isn’t enough to help me find what I need in a book. The ability to do an e-search through a text on a device like the Kindle is a massive time-saver both for readers and especially writers. For example, if I’d had e-texts of Rowling’s Harry Potter tomes back when I was writing my own book on the Potter phenomenon, I might have saved hours (if not days) in research.

Now I can’t offer a recommendation on any of the devices out there, because I’ve never had one. But as soon as I’ve got the free dough to do it, I’m getting one (or, more likely, buying one for my kid). So you’ll need to do your own research: check the reviews at C-Net, at Amazon itself, and around the web in general. But if you like to read (and why wouldn’t you?), the time has come to check these things out. If you’re attracted to a larger form-factor, trust Apple’s hardware (for whatever reason), or are just a good old Steve Jobs fanboy (I was too, for a little while) — maybe the iPad is your e-reader. But I’d wait for the next iteration before reaching for my wallet.

B&N and Borders have both come out with readers; I think Sharp just released one this month, and more iPad competitors are coming out in the coming months. But let’s face it: unless you’re in the SONY camp, Amazon’s product is the most mature and has had the benefit of extensive R&D and user feedback over its three or so life cycles to date. I’ve seen Kindles sitting next to me on the subway and have been amazed at the readability and ease of use of the things, even on a moving train.

Now all that said, I doubt that anyone in their right mind would proclaim the printed book dead. I have a couple hundred books sitting here in this room that you’d have to pry out of my cold dead hands. I especially like the old ones — I have quite a few that date to the 19th century. The feel, smell, and physical interaction with a book that was printed 150 or 200 years ago is something that beggars both value and description — it would be like trying to write a logical proof of the meaning of your first girlfriend’s touch. So for the classics — the books I will read many times during my lifespan — printed paper, glue and binding still have value. The longest-lasting computer hard drive makes it about 5 or 10 years (though I do have floppy disks from the late 80′s that are still readable); while sitting a few feet away from me is an 1839 edition of Lord Byron’s poems that is still eminently readable.

By the way, I don’t really buy into the environmental benefit of e-books that much. The rain forests are being destroyed by agri-business and corporate land developers; books are not a threat to the planet. The environmental value of these devices will come not from a savings of paper so much as from their own durability and longevity. They’re technically fairly simple devices, so the promise on that front is considerable. But people will have to learn to resist the corporations’ impulse to dangle ever-newer, ever-cooler product before them. A well-made e-reader ought to last you a decade or more: if that’s how these things work out, then yes, there will be environmental benefit from this phenomenon.

I’ve also heard people complain: what will this e-reader craze do to my public library? My response to that one is: well, how’s your public library doing now? Yeah, it’s a good home for crickets. So anything that gets more people reading more is very likely to be good for libraries and for society at large. At the very least, it can do no harm.

Tomb of the Unknown Immigrant

Last modified on 2010-07-30 00:11:56 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I have no use for patriotism, except perhaps planetary patriotism. As for tribal and nationalistic lust, it is beneath both meaning and contempt to my mind. But if I were an American patriot, I would consider these honored dead as worthy of remembrance and reverence as the most heroic of our nation’s warriors.

Why? Because they believed so deeply in the promise and opportunity of this land that they were willing to risk everything for a chance at it all. They made the ultimate sacrifice — most of them, doubtless, for something far more important than country. They did it for Family, for Children, for the Future. And now their nameless, faceless bones overflow a morgue in Arizona. There will be no honor guard for them, no coffin with a flag on top, no mis-labeled grave at Arlington Cemetery. Nevertheless, a “tomb of the unknown immigrant” to their memory and honor would be a fitting tribute to them.

We all have our roots, and for the vast majority of us, they are not here. So it was with these dead who, for whatever reason, believed in the promise of our nation. As we have demonstrated time and again here these past few years, our economic problems are not the fault of the poor, the illegal (whatever that means), or the immigrants. Those problems were created by the tiny minority known as the wealthy, and their greed and fear.

We have a choice before us: we can build ever bigger prisons and morgues and walls, or we can choose a more creative solution. Greg Grandin of The Nation has a more detailed and rounded exposition of this point.

David’s Noisy World Tour

Last modified on 2010-07-29 00:48:58 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Yesterday, we sort of beat up on our former colonial masters’ oil company; so in the spirit of fair play, some cautious praise today for the new boss in Britain. In the nation of whose government he recently took charge, he is known as a Tory — that is, a Conservative. But believe me, if you live on the left edge of the pond, you’ve never seen a Conservative like this one. Consider:

David Cameron has massively pissed off the entire pro-Israeli set by insisting that “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.” Hoo baby, can you imagine any politician over here saying that? There would be no place for him to hide, except maybe Helen Thomas’ house.

David Cameron has also distanced himself from fellow Euro-righties Angela (Germany) and Nick (France) by boisterously advocating for Turkey’s admission to the EU. And again, he’s got a certain way with words: “I believe it is just wrong to say that Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit in the tent.”

He’s a cagey one, this Dave Cameron. He gained office via some 11th hour negotiation with the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Nick Clegg, became Deputy PM in the process. But he doesn’t appear to believe in rhetorical ambiguity. In fact, Cameron speaks like a man who is on the verge of leaving office, not like someone who just took over. Today, he went to India and revealed that he’d spent some time reading Mr. Assange’s latest Wikileaks collection when he blasted Pakistan.

“We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able to promote the export of terror, whether to India or Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world.

“That is why this relationship is important. But it should be a relationship based on a very clear message: that it is not right to have any relationship with groups that are promoting terror. Democratic states that want to be part of the developed world cannot do that. The message to Pakistan from the US and from the UK is very clear on that point.”

Well, is it? I realize it’s a lot to ask of the post-campaign double-speaking Obama to confirm or deny that. We’re talking now about a man who left his edge somewhere in Denver, Des Moines, or Berlin. In fact, David Cameron appears to be, rhetorically at least, sort of what we expected from our guy. Cameron has brought his town hall voice into 10 Downing St.

Speaking of which, I wonder if he can manage to look into that little Downing St. memo which has been consigned to ancient history over here. I wouldn’t rule it out: this is the same guy who apologized for Bloody Sunday and has set up an investigation (they call it an “inquiry”) into crimes at Gitmo.

True, he does appear to bear some of the stain of conservatism, most notably this obsession with fiscal austerity (translation: making the poor and middle classes pay for the crimes of Wall St. — it’s the going thing among us. And remember, the AIG debacle has its source totally in Britain, the Financial Products division of that company, which is largely responsible for the bailout mania that happened over here).

And I don’t know what to make of this “Big Society” thing (is he channeling LBJ?). Anyway, here he is on that one:

There is a tragic waste of potential in this country today. The young people of this country are as passionate and idealistic as any generation before – perhaps more passionate. But too many teenagers appear lost and feel their lives lack shape and direction.

National Citizen Service will help change that. A kind of non-military national service, it’s going to mix young people from different backgrounds in a way that doesn’t happen right now. It’s going to teach them what it means to be socially responsible. Above all it’s going to inspire a generation of young people to appreciate what they can achieve and how they can be part of the Big Society.

Usually, when a politician gives some bloated, glitzy marketing name to some social initiative, you can bet it’s either a distraction from his own incompetence and corruption or else some boondoggle that funnels money to corporations. The Big Society might well be either of those things, and if I was a citizen of the UK, I’d be exploring that question a little less casually than I am now from this side of the pond. Nevertheless, David Cameron has a strange appeal: you get the feeling that he didn’t take a muzzle along with his oath of office, unlike certain other world leaders I can think of.

Greenpeace Vandalists Attack Gotham City

Last modified on 2010-07-28 01:45:15 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Ah, Robin, if only that genius could be used for GOOD and not EVIL…”
“Yeah, Batman, the BP spokeswoman said that the poor ambulances couldn’t get fuel because of these tricksters…”
“And as we know, Robin, there’s nowhere else in all of London to gas up except BP.”

__________________________________________________

In other BP news, ex-CEO Tony the (dead) Fish said he’s “too busy” to show up before Congress anytime soon. I’m with him on that: I remember how busy I was after I lost my job…never a moment to spare, you know. And I didn’t have to deal with all the trouble of banking a $1.6M sayonara payoff. Jeez, I hope someone gives him his life back…

Wi-Key: Unlocking Power’s Crypt

Last modified on 2010-07-27 15:16:50 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

You might think that yesterday was a proud day for geeks everywhere, and you would be right — it was. Because one of our own — supported by numberless volunteers — once again took the world’s imperial media to school and reminded them that, in a healthy society, there is a vibrant tension between a free press and the state; and that the most effective means of undermining Power is to simply pull the advertising cover off its bloated, bubonic nakedness. If that principle makes you uncomfortable, let me recommend China, Burma, or many other states where such tension is blissfully absent.

Young Mr. Assange merely showed the world’s powerful leaders that while war may be a very cool thing to do between rounds of golf and dinner with the masters of Goldman Sachs, it does carry a price. If the cult of death is your life, if geopolitical murder is an identity that makes your heart sing with patriotic fervor and the righteous, blood-spattered love of an external Deity — very well. But prepare to be exposed at every turn.

In any event, if you’re looking for the best presentation of this new Assange collection online, never mind the Times — go to the UK Guardian instead. They made excellent use of the 10 days or so that they, the Times, and Germany’s Der Spiegel were given to digest and prepare this material.

Incidentally, if you’re in the Obama camp that says Assange is one of Them and that he has made us Insecure (talk about a mighty projection) — consider that the Pentagon is saying something quite different. Or, as Jay Rosen points out:

This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)

There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)

That entire Rosen piece is well worth reading, because it demolishes the entire Obusha script that is being spread throughout our media this week. Rosen clearly shows that though the face, voice, and name of Power may change from time to time, its dark, droning noise of fear is tiresomely consistent.

But now the real work begins. Information is useful, but not by itself transformative. That is the job of insight (I’ve often wondered how different tech and business might be if IT meant “Insight Technology” rather than “Information Technology”). Or, as young Mr. Assange might put it in terms that our President can understand: information can create Hope; but insight is the stuff of Change.

Van Jones’ Folly

Last modified on 2010-07-25 04:06:04 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

Obama has basically admitted: I am being driven and beaten like a rented mule by the media culture of our day. That is not the kind of confession I want to hear from the President of the United States of America.

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One of the necessary responsibilities of living in a democratic society is that of disagreeing openly with those you otherwise admire. Comment readers here have no doubt noted that I occasionally cross swords with my blogging partner and a few regular readers. Today, I had the same impression on reading Van Jones’ op-ed in the Times on the Sherrod debacle.

What Jones does is to repeat the Obama meme that it’s all the media culture’s fault that these things happen.

Anyone with a laptop and a flip camera can engineer a fake info-virus and inject it into the body politic. Those with cable TV shows and axes to grind can concoct their own realities. The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as our national immune system, zapping scandal-mongers and quashing wild rumors. As a step toward further democratizing America, we shrunk those old gatekeepers — and ended up weakening democracy’s defenses. Rapidly developing communication technologies did the rest.

This is a really unfortunate excuse from a very intelligent man. No, you cannot blame technology and weak institutional standards for what is really a human failure. In my world, common sense — what others call “morality” — is still valid and operational in the 21st century. In an institution led by folks with healthy common sense, Ms. Sherrod would have, at worst, been suspended pending investigation once that video appeared. No lives were in danger, no physical destruction or crime was occurring; the authorities in charge, had they any common sense to guide them, could have refused to be pushed by the technology, the noise, and the FOX News heavy breathing, and taken the time to look deeper before rushing into action.

What they’re dealing with now is the exposure of their own immaturity, not to mention a potential (and expensive) lawsuit for libel and defamation from Ms. Sherrod (and I wouldn’t blame her for an instant if she started one). And our President only made it worse with his “it’s the media’s fault” whining. With those remarks combined with the ongoing, pointless, and interminable tragedy in Afghanistan, his star has utterly fallen into the dust. I see no clear line of demarcation between him and Bush, only a gray, fading, blurry, wavering field of the vaguest dissonance. In fact, in this you could argue that he’s even more incompetent than Bush-Rove, for Obama has basically admitted: I am being driven and beaten like a rented mule by the media culture of our day. That is not the kind of confession I want to hear from the President of the United States of America.

I am sick to the bone of seeing technology blamed for what are truly the faults and follies of human ego. If Obama, Van Jones, and the Democrats in general would like to see change, they must stand up for it, even fight for it with the weapon that I call common sense. Ms. Sherrod did exactly that: rather than mutely backing down and seeing if she could make more money on the lecture circuit or academia, she stood fast against her accusers, her maligners (Breitbart and FOX), and against her betrayers (the Obama administration and the NAACP). Her courage and common sense are a lesson to young Mr. Obama and the rest of the snot-nosed kids in his government.

A far better and clearer analysis of this episode was delivered by another Times op-ed regular, Bob Herbert.

This woman was thrown to the wolves without even the courtesy of a conversation. Her side of the story? The truth? The administration wasn’t interested.

And the blame for that falls squarely on the people at the very top in the White House. Why didn’t President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden or Rahm (call me Rahmbo) Emanuel, or somebody somewhere in the upper echelon say, “Hey, what the heck are you doing? You can’t fire a person without hearing her side of the story. This is not the Kremlin. Are you nuts?”

Van Jones, Barack Obama — let me submit that you kids have some growing up to do. We live in a country that used to have a vibrant and often effective educational paradigm known as learning from the elders. The two of you could scarcely do better than to climb out of your it’s-all-tech’s-fault mud puddle and listen to Mr. Herbert and especially, the wise Ms. Sherrod. They could teach you both a thing or two that you just might remember.

Of Oligarchy, Feudalism, and Dickens

Last modified on 2010-07-24 20:23:47 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Greenwald raises an important point today, starting from the non-reaction to WaPo’s Top Secret America story: the political class, no matter which party is in power in either Congress or the White House, is not interested in repairing the damage done by (let alone reversing the causes of) their own actions (or, more typically, non-actions) and those of their corporate enablers. It is simply not in their interest — even when the people would overwhelmingly support them in so doing (or undoing). This goes well beyond the foreign policy orientation of the TSA story, the Liz Warren situation being a classic case in point: for all the pile of political capital to be gained by forcefully supporting her as head of the new consumer protection bureau for financial services products, the White House and its followers don’t dare bite the corporate hand that feeds them. In other words, political capital means nothing to these people — only plain, green material capital matters now. Greenwald concludes:

“In virtually every area, the subservience of Government to large business interests is so complete that it’s impossible to find the line where government ends and corporate power begins. It’s a full-scale merger. That’s the central fact of our political life. Most everything else is a distraction.”

If I were a rich guy, I’d take that graphic above (though the two lower lines are so straight and low it’s hard to see them at first), which I found at Greenwald’s post (click it to see an enlargement), and put it onto T-shirts, coffee mugs, backpacks, rugs, beach towels, curtains, and of course flags — and give them away. Anything to foment resistance to oligarchy and feudalism. We are now at a point described in what is perhaps the most renowned opening paragraph in all of western literature, from Dickens. I add the second paragraph below for its obvious reference to our moment, in the last line:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

Geekday: Apple’s Sunny Omen

Last modified on 2010-07-22 11:57:46 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

TIGER WOODS ALERT: I’m working on a standard project-tracking spreadsheet in my new job (more on that below), and I got this warning message from MS Excel today. A minor infidelity indeed…Of course, to match Tiger’s infidelity output that “number of occurrences” would need to be a bit larger, by roughly a hundred or so…

Speaking of excess, it is now official: Apple raises money like Andrew Breitbart raises filth. So are RIM and Nokia just spitting sour grapes because their profits aren’t up 78%? What do you think?

A. Yep, Apple won the game and the losers are crying to the ref.
B. No, Apple made a cheap slander on the competition and its competitors are right to call Steve on it.
C. Wake me up in a while so I can give a shit…

Personally, I take C. Keep in mind, though: with power comes trouble. Apple is the new world leader in software security vulnerabilities. I’ve run Macs for 7 years now, pretty much continuously, and configured and tested a fair few of them at work, and have never installed an anti-virus or anti-malware program on one of them. Mac users, your time for shelling out to Norton may be arriving…*

So let’s see what else is up in the techno-universe. Facebook reaching half a billion users is in the C category above, let’s move on (especially since nothing’s changed there — just check out the story of Cow Clicker).

MSNBC has nominated the Oakland area as the Silicon Valley of pot growing. As one commenter mentioned, Intel and pot smokers both go through a lot of chips. Pass the bong.

Now here’s a genuinely interesting trend: Amazon is now selling more e-books than hardcovers. You can explain it however you like, but the bottom line is fairly clear: 9 bucks for a Kindle book, 20+ for a hardcover. The device winds up paying for itself, especially given that it comes with a free wifi account. People aren’t as stupid as they sometimes think they are…except for Apple fanbois, of course.

Finally today, a note from my new gig. I’m in what is an old residential facility at the university, the first floor of which is the IT office where I work. One of the first things that struck me, almost flattened me: no cubicles. No kidding, not a frigging furry box in sight. Plaster walls, narrow hallways, private bathrooms (you go in, lock the door, and do your business undisturbed). And I have my own windowless office with a door. I don’t have a good read of the culture there yet: everyone seems laid back (a sys admin with some corporate experience assured me that the place is “stress-free”), but I’m not in the fire yet, and the project deadlines on my gig won’t start looming until near the end of summer. But it does have a good feel to it: I start the day at 10AM (great for a relaxed morning and an easy commute), and the boss seems both competent and stable, which is pretty rare for most CTOs I’ve worked under.

Now, does all that make it worth less than half the rate I made pre-recession? Here is where most folks in our money-drunk culture will think me demented: my answer is yes. The way things look now, if AIG called again with an offer in the same range they paid me before, I’d lean heavily towards nada.

I have to emphasize that it took some persuasion on my part to even get an interview with this university. The recruiter thought my salary history would be an obstacle, so I told him: no one but us needs to know. I reviewed the salient facts of the current global economy with him, and then turned his focus toward my desire to get out of the corporate game. Finally, I made an earnest pitch about my respect for academia and its product, knowledge and scholarship. Doesn’t mean I always love or agree with what they’re doing; it means I can generate enthusiasm for their product more than I can for an insurance policy or a marketing plan for a global investment bank. I have nothing against insurance as a product, having benefited from public insurance (UI) for the past 17 months. I just can’t get excited about it.

I’m a pretty small, insignificant guy when you come down to it: if I can pay my bills and feel like I’m working with good people in a generally supportive environment, I can let the big money go to others. As Apple has and will continue to discover, with big money comes big trouble. I think that if you can teach a man to discard his excess, he can be happy with amazingly little stuff and diversion. To contemplate the cosmos in all its vastness and its incredibly harmonic order is often enough to fill a day. Here’s a picture from APOD of the recent solar eclipse in the southern hemisphere, showing the sun’s corona.

Sure, if I was rich I could have traveled to see that eclipse in person. But sometimes just looking at the moon on a summer night can give you enough satisfaction to deeply feel that pulse of space-time’s inimitable perfection:

Friends in Low Places

Last modified on 2010-07-21 15:12:57 GMT. 8 comments. Top.

Jason Linkins is quickly developing into one of the more lucid voices on the world wide web. Consider this penetrating comment on the recent Obama jab at the GOP on unemployment extension:

But the Obama administration — and this is going to be really shocking news — don’t really have the stomach for a street fight, unless it’s the sort of fight where you bloody your opponent on the very day it becomes no longer possible to lose.

As modestly critical as I’ve been of the President, it hadn’t occurred to me to call him a coward (I called Bush a coward lots of times). But Linkins is right: cowardice is the cornerstone of the Obama game plan. Mollycoddle the right wing whenever possible, and then strike them while they’re going down. And when in doubt, throw another 30,000 troops at a problem that you cannot understand.

As Linkins says in that article, Obama is acting stupid (“effing stupid,” in Linkins’ words). There’s got to be something wrong with that claim; Obama’s a smart guy, we all know that. And there’s the problem.

I have said it over and over again: when intellect is shoved onto the stage of life naked and alone, it sickens and dies. It fails. Consider this quote from a recent Hedges article on climate change:

We have fallen prey to the illusion that we can modify and control our environment, that human ingenuity ensures the inevitability of human progress and that our secular god of science will save us. The “intoxicating belief that we can conquer all has come up against a greater force, the Earth itself,” Hamilton writes. “The prospect of runaway climate change challenges our technological hubris, our Enlightenment faith in reason and the whole modernist project.

That, it seems to me, puts Obama’s cowardice into a different and broader — even a cosmic — light. Most of our homeostatic and survival mechanisms are located in our non-intellectual, “small” brains; it would appear that the cortical brain is the engine of analysis, creation, and conquest. Yet any part isolated from its whole becomes degraded, perverted, demonic, if you will.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times in talking about Bush, cowardice and stupidity are inseparable; they are the yin and yang of tyranny and destruction. The brand of stupidity we’re talking about here is highly intellectual (and as I’ve said, Bush was not a dummy): it calculates, schemes, and then attacks the weakest point from the worst possible direction. That’s the effect of the cortical actor pushed out into the drama of life with no company or support.

Many in the media and the left-wing blogosphere made a terrible error in claiming that Bush’s reliance on “feeling” and “gut instincts” was his undoing. I think he and his circle were, if anything, hyper-intellectual; the Karl Rove mind is a machine of calculation that is really a kind of political version of Excel.

But the large brain, it must be emphasized, doesn’t need to be overthrown or subjugated or discarded, even if such things were possible. It merely needs company; it needs to have friends in low places. And I’ve got to go to work now, see ya.
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Greenwald today also has something on the Obama admin’s cowardice, re. the Sherrod episode.

Are You Sleeping, Brother John?

Last modified on 2010-07-21 03:00:53 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

More Mahler, because a man doesn’t turn 150 years old every damned month. This is one of the more famous funeral marches in all of music, and responsible in part for Mahler’s rep as a psychoanalytic composer — I think you’ll get the drift when you hear the theme he chose.

This is more than a humorous death-dance to a children’s song, though. It fairly overflows with exquisite lyricism as well (part two is here). It is another of those beautiful paradoxes that make art — a death march bursting with life.

Anyway, in case you missed it the first time, you can go back to our earlier post on Mahler’s more serious death song.

Unemployment: Some of What I Learned

Last modified on 2010-07-20 11:40:51 GMT. 6 comments. Top.

Tomorrow, after 17 months on line E, I return to the work force. As I mentioned in a recent comment to this HuffPo story:

It’s been just short of 17 months, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Thanks to loans, handouts from friends and family, liquidating meager assets, and selling belongings, I hung onto my apt. in NYC. Last week, I bagged a 3-month stint at a university here, at half my pre-recession rate. I’m in debt for over ten grand, owe back taxes, and going back to work will keep my hole from getting any deeper into the autumn.

Once again, I emphasize: I’m one of the lucky ones.

This, of course, is in support of a simple point we’ve both repeated here, and which our President (finally!) made this morning: the unemployed of this economy, GOP talking points notwithstanding, are not laggards, layabouts, or disposable remnants of the late unpleasantness on Wall St.

So, as I adjust to this return to the workaday world, posting is likely to be light for a bit. Over the past 17 months, I have learned a great deal that is of immense personal meaning, but which probably does not translate well to the public domain. In fact, what follows — scraps from a notebook I carry on my daily walks — is likely to arouse little more than light ridicule at best and a snort of scorn otherwise. But, scruffy and wheezy as they are, they arise from the heart, as did my New Year’s Message to Corporate America.

I do not claim to lack bitterness; all I can say in my defense is that I strive to make bitterness a flavor rather than an aftertaste.

No demon is invincible. That is, there is no fear that cannot be defeated. Stepping off the “beaten” path is the surest way to avoid defeat. No matter how meager your circumstances, give what you can to yourself, so you can better pass it along to others. Learn to meet every reversal with laughter, for it takes you off the iron, bipolar bar of fortune and misfortune. A good, clear question is worth more than a thousand ambivalent answers.

To be a winner, you don’t always have to finish in first place. Accomplishment and reward are one; insight and action are simultaneous and inseparable. On the path of mindfulness, the true seeker pursues neither fullness nor emptiness. You are neither of these.

You can sell anything you own, but your self has no price. To sell that is to die the only death worth fearing. The most deadly loss is scarcely noticed. It’s as Kierkegaard said*: keys, five dollars, your iPhone, an arm, house, job — a loss of any of these is easily perceived; but the loss of one’s self is rarely and usually belatedly sensed. Where there is no awareness, there will be no grievance. Let grief be the risk of awareness, and you will never fail.

Awareness is the ladder leading out of the trench of profit and loss. Free of fakery and excess, the true self is capable of surviving, of enduring, of succeeding, beyond every dream or expectation. As Thomas Mann said, “No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.”
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*In The Sickness Unto Death. I was sort of paraphrasing SK — I doubt that he had an iPhone.

Encounter in Prospect Park: Man’s Final Solution and Nature’s Enduring One

Last modified on 2010-07-18 03:21:04 GMT. 11 comments. Top.

If, as a society, we consistently say that death is the solution, then we are also saying that life is the problem. This is a manifestly suicidal response to challenge or difficulty; to make such an approach your culture’s defining management trait is to enter Conrad’s heart of darkness, where everything is the horror, or Dante’s 7th region, where every hope has indeed been abandoned.

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On my walk in Prospect Park today, I walked into a scene that would have made Orwell shiver. A small group of about 30 protesters had assembled beside the lake. I recognized several of them: they were Park Slope yuppies, most of them, middle class and upper middle class folks with kids, dogs, bikes, and signs. A few representatives from the Humane Society of the United States were among them, talking and passing out leaflets.

They were protesting the mass killing of hundreds of geese that were native to the park — that is, not migratory. The talk was rational and even analytical: one of the HSUS reps mentioned that his organization had appealed months ago to Mayor Bloomberg and other government officials, asking that real animal experts be consulted before rash and destructive actions were taken (later, I quickly found that this was true — indeed, they had). But their pleas had been ignored, and hundreds of these creatures were slaughtered in the name of public safety, as noted in my prior post.

But my attention was gradually drawn elsewhere. For I soon noted that there was a laughably overwrought police presence on hand. Consider the photograph above: three cars — one marked and two unmarked. I counted at least five armed police on hand. There was another, with an “NYPD Community Services” polo shirt on, amid the protesters. He, too, had a piece hanging from his pendulous waist:

I walked over toward the squad cars, because I wanted to see how these men were treating this threat to public safety and social order. I already knew how the protesters felt: angry, outraged, helpless, bitter. I wanted to see how these men were responding to this fool’s errand, at which at least one cop was present for every four or five of these Park Slope residents who had suddenly become grave dangers to social order and peace.

They were laughing and joking among themselves, yet with that cynical joy that failed to conceal their awareness of the folly of their mission. Their smiles did not reach into their eyes; their casual stances against the cars were strained. They were clearly uncomfortable with this assignment, which basically amounted to presenting a looming, spying force over a group of their neighbors who they know damned well are as insurgent as mice.

So what was their problem with these yuppie rebels who had dared to gather in a public park without burgers, hot dogs, a barbecue — trappings which would have left them, in this place, free of suspicion from the authorities? As I returned to their side of the road, I realized what was the main subject of their outrage. It was the secrecy. Everything about this slaughter of geese — these creatures that they and their kids had enjoyed for years as part of the Prospect Park experience — had been done undercover. The killing itself was done under cover of darkness. There had been no public meetings, no discussion, no debate involving the residents whose taxes support the park and whose lives are enriched by it. The HSUS reps said they had assumed that something like this slaughter was being planned, since other local governments around the country had been doing it and local pols had been calling for a final solution, if you will pardon the term, to the problem of birds flying into aircraft engines.

Beneath all that was something that even these people, upper middle class, intelligent folks, could not quite articulate. If we as a society consistently say that death is the only solution, then we are also saying that life is the problem. This is a manifestly suicidal response to challenge or difficulty; to make such an approach your culture’s defining management trait is to enter Conrad’s heart of darkness, where everything is the horror, or Dante’s 7th region, where every hope has indeed been abandoned. One of the HSUS guys simply said, there are better, more humane, and even cheaper ways of managing this kind of a problem than with mass slaughter and all the force, vigilance, technology, and repetition it requires.

But death is, in fact, the preferred solution of authority in our time. Whether the undesirables are people in Iraq or Afghanistan; the Taliban, including their wives, children, and elders; dark-faced, orange-clad men in a prison in Cuba who are neither innocent nor guilty, but merely enemies; or a few hundred geese in a public park — any group that is labeled a threat, an enemy, an evil must be exterminated — quickly, cleanly, mercilessly. For those in power, death is the easiest solution; for everyone else, it is merely murder and waste and ignorance.

I walked off toward the other end of the lake, head hanging. There is no answer to the final solution, I thought — what can 30 yuppie Park Slopers do against the combined powers of the Federal government and the financial might of the Bloomberg empire? Power always, always wins, and there is no getting past that, no changing that. Then I sighed, looked up, and saw this: