Tourette's Du Jour

It's way past time to free Leonard Peltier.

2011-05-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

Dear President Obama
Perhaps the only Americans America has treated worse then African-Americans are the people who were here first, the Native Americans. The history of institutional violence towards the First Peoples is well documented and continues to this day.

Whether it is the Bureau of Indian Affairs/U.S. Department of the Interior’s continued, deliberate mismanagement of Native owned natural resource rights (see Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s recent rulings in Cobell v. Salazar), the Termination Program instituted during the Presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower (see House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953 and Public Law 28) which resulted in the illegal conversion to private ownership of approximately 1,365,801 acres lands previously held as tribal lands, or hundreds of legislative acts going back to the founding of our great country, the record of abuse suffered by Native Americans by our hands is a national disgrace. Perhaps you didn’t realize, as the person who best represents our great tradition of religious freedom, that Native Peoples were legally prohibited from practicing their religious beliefs until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) of 1978! I certainly was unaware of this until recently. Despite the progress our country has made in so many ways, the disgraceful and abusive treatment of America’s First Peoples continues to this day and shames our nation and the principles upon which this nation was established.

It is as a direct result of the illegal Termination Program of 1953 that my appeal comes to you today. The American Indian Movement, much like the several civil rights movements of the 1960s, was founded responsive to the theft of Native rights and lands and the hateful tradition of violence inflicted upon the Native Peoples at the hands of racists and opportunists who valued money and profits over Native lives. In 1975 Leonard Peltier (now Federal Prisoner #89637-1320) answered the call to the people of the American Indian Movement for help and put himself between those who would kill Native Peoples for their lands and natural resources and those whose rights were again being betrayed. Since Mr. Peltier’s trial in1977, evidence continues to come to light in appeal after appeal that directly contradicts that which was presented by the government at the trial where Mr Peltier was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. Even the FBI itself has acknowledged that the Bureau withheld exculpatory evidence; that the rifle linked to Mr. Peltier was not his nor had he ever been associated with that weapon; that the rifle in question was not actually at the scene or used in the crime; that the ‘eye-witness’ who testified against Mr. Peltier — a woman alleged to be Mr. Peltier’s ‘girl-friend’ —had never met Mr. Peltier; and that there was no way for the FBI to prove who fired the shots that killed the agents. Nor has the FBI ever explained why it sent more than 50 agents to the reservation that night, ostensibly to arrest a man who stole a pair of used cowboy boots. In the end the last appeal acknowledged that Mr. Peltier hadn’t killed the agents but stated that his actions “aided and abetted” those who did and thus his sentence was reasonable and appropriate!

Mr. Peltier has already served 34-years for “aiding and abetting.” There are many former prisoners who were actively involved in murder who served less than one eighth of the sentence Mr. Peltier has already served on these trumped up charges! In 2009 Mr. Peltier again came before the United States Parole Commission and he was again denied parole. If he lives so long, Mr. Peltier is allowed to again petition for parole in 2024, at which point he will have served nearly 50 years for a crime everyone acknowledges he didn’t commit. Like Nelson Mandela, Mr. Peltier is no common criminal, but a political prisoner held by a dangerously corrupted system that ignores both the actual evidence and the history of oppression that placed Mr. Peltier and those like him in harm’s way. At this point his, and America’s only hope, is executive clemency. I know that such acts are more typically granted to connected, white, wealthy, powerful people like Scooter Libby and Marc Rich but I’m hoping that you will give some serious thought to undoing some small part of the great damage this country has done to the people who were here first by either pardoning Leonard Peltier or commuting his sentence. I would very much appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter. I would be even more appreciative if you took action to right the wrongs suffered by this courageous and heroic American.

How I learned to stop hating Hofmann.

2011-03-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Hans Hofmann’s “Effervescence” 1944, A(n in)Formal Analysis.

Examining Hans Hofmann’s “Effervescence,” a painting he completed in 1944, in the very institution that was built to house this collection of 47 masterworks his wife gave to the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in 1930 and 1931, is an ouroboros exercise — where does the tail of the snake who eats itself end? I selected Hofmann’s piece because I’ve never like Hofmann’s work and I don’t understand why it’s important, especially this work which is given prominence in the exhibit by its dominating location. Perhaps this paper will help me discover his relevance. In that light I also purchased and read Hofmann’s Search for the Real, to better help me understand and respond to this work.

Hofmann’s “Effervescence” is a painting approximately 36 inches wide by 54.5 inches tall utilizing the materials of oil paint, casein, enamel, and India ink applied to a plywood panel. Hung in a room devoted to Hofmann’s work, it is backlit by a floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking a portion of the Berkeley Art Museum’s exterior gardens. The walls and floor and ceiling of the museum are the neutral gray of its concrete building material with no softening modern building design elements or colors. The net effect is not entirely unlike creating a cave or a cavern where the art is meant to be the most prominent element of the landscape, and it is clear that displaying artworks was the most important design criteria for the curators and architects. It should also be noted that this structure has distinct and unique acoustic properties that may play a role in creating a sacred space for the viewing of art. The painting is well illuminated by gallery display lights that are far from the painting and out of sight for the viewer. Neither the painting’s frame nor its surroundings visibly overwhelm or even intrude on the work and there are no readily visible placards identifying the work. Despite that the painting was viewed during a class visit, and that there were at least two different classes visiting the museum that day, the gallery is not crowed and the painting is not obstructed and was easily approached. Even the museum guards kept a respectful distance from the object and the viewer.

The structure of the painting is immediately discernable: Over a thin neutral gray wash which does little to conceal the texture of the surface of the painting, which presumably was coated in gesso, the artist has imposed two large triangles of color. A soft, cool, organic green wash roughly bisects the canvas diagonally from upper right to lower left claiming more than the lower half of the painting. It varies in density and tone allowing multiple brushstokes to build up a color density that gives the work both warmth and intrigue. Similarly a warm flesh- pink color, green’s complement, washes over the image defining a rough triangle in the upper left quadrant of the painting, oppositional to the vegetal-green shape. In both cases the underlying gray brushwork is allowed to show through, especially in those areas surrounding the center image of the painting. The pink and green brushwork is loose and irregular causing the pigments to pile up in some sections creating a texture and density of color that further defines the organic, natural and nature-like qualities of the image’s defining edges. I have the sense that Hofmann was intent on creating a frame within which to constrain the exuberant central image yet to come, and he is noted for saying that the first line placed on a canvas is in fact the fifth line in the composition. He uses his colors, pink and green with added white pigment, to add texture and depth in the major color-fields he has created, and to define a hard pink, slightly curved line at the top of the painting, which encloses the image and forces our eye back down into the composition.

The next application of paint on the image are two large black areas that have a solidity, fluidity and high gloss appearance suggesting the pigment was poured on to rather than brushed on to the panel. In that the Hans Hofmann catalogue states that this image was created using oil paints, enamel paints, casein paints and India ink, it is reasonable to assume that this is black enamel paint, and that after pouring the media onto the panel in a circular glob at the top of the ‘canvas,’ Hofmann manipulated it to create a bubbled derby-looking top shape with a bold black curving line, similar to the brim of a hat. The black line is parallel and in opposition to the previously noted nearby pink line that tops the painting. A second large black structural element appears to have been splotched and blotched into a large roughly rectangular shape that is allowed to drip and run down the vertical surface of the composition, pulled by gravity but restrained by the viscosity of the material in a slow moving barely controlled ooze that actually runs off the lower left edge of the painting in a thin diagonal streak. These two dense black elements dominate the central third of the image and the contrasting color value of the black against the soft pastel pink and green forces a great depth into the image, almost as though the viewer were staring into an abyss. As an aside, the resulting black shapes Hofmann created in “Effervescence” are strikingly similar to ink sketches the artist composed while teaching in California in 1931. This is also suggested in Search for the Real: “In Hofmann’s simplified representations of landscape, such as the drawings (“Island in the Bay, California” and “Trees and Landscapes, California,” both 1931), it is possible to observe shapes which reappear in his later abstract paintings” (pps 16-17). Despite the obvious similarities, the painting “Effervescence” is not specifically identified as such an example.

Reasserting control over the painting’s liquid ‘accidents,’ Hofmann uses the diagonal runaway drip as impetus to create two black slash lines upon the image, both starting on the far right side of the composition. The first, a thick black brush stroke that breaks the painting’s edge, parallel but in the opposite direction of the drip, fights gravity, and rises out of the upper portion of the dominant black rectangular element to pierce the upper right side-edge of the work. The second, a much more tentative gesture, takes a runaway drip and directs it diagonally from the bottom right edge into the center bottom of the composition. The quality of this line is similar to the thin, indistinct quality of the original runaway drip. Tending toward transparency and ending directly in the middle of the work, this insubstantial black line frames the composition at the bottom just as the hard pink line frames the composition at the top. Each line, pink and black, directs our attention back into the image.

At approximately the same time the artist established the painting’s heavy black gravitational foundation, which defines the deepest depth of “Effervescence,” using his brush he developed an ash-blue shadow on top of a portion of the triangular pink area that resembles a large skeleton-key hole shape in the upper left center of the painting. This element is possibly responsive to the upper right black hat-shape. While not exactly complementary colors, the pink and the blue work together to create a sharp vibrational contrast that draws our attention more than one would normally expect. This is the only place in “Effervescence” where Hofmann has used the color blue, and he carefully modeled the shape to give it a texture and substantial solidity that might balance the density of the nearly monolithic, abstract black hole that also demands our focus at the top of the painting. While the bottom of the keyhole shape dissolves into the central image, even in its dissolution it implies a solid, deliberately artist-crafted element, receding yet still balancing the central image. Atop this blue shape and at several intersections of colors throughout the work Hofmann has dribbled an earthy brown pigment that struggles with the black voids in a war for control of our focus. Toward the center of the painting and on the right side of the blue keyhole shape, where the dribbled brown paint intersects the brushed blue shape, this color has created a plane or ‘face’ and a hard right edge which draws the viewer’s focus into the central image and down the canvas. Like blood the loose brown line works further down the painting only to then follow the original runaway black streak diagonally off the lower left edge of the composition. Spiritually, not figuratively, it suggests death’s black hand wrestling in a battle for supremacy with life’s bloody, fecal earthiness. Another dribbled and smudged heavy brown streak vertically bisects the rough black rectangle, cleaving deep up into it, while a third, much lighter and thinner downward dribbling streak, like the third tine on a trident, approaches but does not penetrate the far right edge of the image, constraining the gloom and delicately redirecting our attention back into the painting.

The penultimate layer of the painting is an explosion of thick, glossy liquid white casein splotches, while organic and accidental, clearly also referencing Hofmann’s earlier sketches, but in white this time rather than black. The thorough art history researcher learns from the “Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection of the Online Archive of California” that “‘Effervescence’ consists of pools of pigment poured and dripped onto the canvas with little premeditation.” Further the casual researcher is told: “By welcoming chance effects, Hofmann introduced the aesthetic of controlled accident into his work.” In “Effervescence” it is obvious that Hofmann slopped and poured and pushed around the thick, glossy, brilliant white casein on the surface of his carefully layered composition as an antidote to the gravitational pull of his large dark black voids. Like clotted cream Hofmann freely layered numerous organic globules of this ancient milk-based pigment onto his work creating a perfect, nearly-sterile counterpoint to the organic, natural lushness of the colored elements of the painting while also using the powerful stark white to contrast with the heavy dark black holes he had earlier created. It is with the white elements — one might suggest ‘highlights’ — that the magic of creative transformation occurs. What had previously been simply a process suddenly becomes a “living object.” Like fresh flower buds, two white blossoms, also breast-like, define the center of the painting. Pushing out, up and away from the mass of the central form, these twin white globules both draw our eye’s attention and push our gaze out into either side of the painting. Another small splotch of white casein, higher on the image, establishes a central axis for the composition. These shapes, lacking color, work together to create a strong vertical orientation to the ambiguous central image. While there are several additional small splotches of casein descending on the far right side of the image, the remaining dominant white element is a large, amputated white triangular shape centered in the image that falls off the bottom of the painting. This white shape also works to anchor the composition while reaffirming a white vertical axis for the central image. Attached to the top of this truncated triangular shape is a poured white casein gesture that dribbles diagonally up and to the right into the image encouraging our eye to continually move restlessly around the painting.

Hofmann’s final gestures are delicate black India ink lines, mostly in the white areas at the bottom of the painting, which are deliberately introduced to define texture, volume and direction to his otherwise mostly accidental applications of pigments. These are “the hand of man,” working both visually and symbolically to reassert the artist’s control over the various accidents of process that have created this painting. It must be plainly stated that this work, which resembles but precedes Jackson Pollock’s famous dribble paintings, does not appear to be crafted as a representational image. That said, in the final analysis, all human gestures are symbolic, and all symbols are representational if one has the proper tools with which to interpret the message. Hans Hofmann was 64 years old when “Effervescence” was created and he’d been a studio artist and art instructor for many decades. His “casual” gestures and the “accidents of process” not withstanding, this work is balanced and has a composition that not only references the outer world but demands that the viewer also seek to understand and interpret what may have started out as a series of random processes but inevitably must be resolved into a meaningful image.

Fred Dodsworth © February 23, 2010

Cited
Hofman, Hans, edited by Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hays, Jr. Search for the Real, and other essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts. M.I.T. Press, 1967.
“The Guide to the Hans Hofmann Collection.” Online Archive of California. University of California’s Digital Library. Web. February 25, 2011. (http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf2n39n563.)

Food, not Lawns

2010-12-16T22:29:00.000-08:00

As humanity treads dully into the second decade of the 21st Century, all the issues we’ve been warned about over and over for the past forty years regarding population growth, food safety and security, and climate change remain unresolved. Despite hundreds of government meetings and proclamations involving most of the nations of the earth, despite thousands of scientific conferences involving tens of thousands of scholars and scientists, despite mass protests and arrests, court cases, conferences and legislation — the planet we live on today is horribly unhealthy, and the people who live on this planet also are becoming horribly unhealthy. The ironic thing is that all these issues rapidly come back one issue — our modern diet. This is an issue we are capable of resolving to a great degree without institutional intervention, through our own action. Americans eat unhealthy food to an unhealthy degree. The economic and institutional policies Americans promulgate for food production are major factors in global poverty, starvation, civil unrest, and environmental degradation. The manufacturing of the food Americans eat is a major component of climate change. Worse, we lead by example and the American example is unsustainable on every level, despite that it is becoming the dominant paradigm. We can no longer wait passively for someone else, for some government agency, or miracle technological advancement to resolve all these issues so we don’t have to “become the change we wish to see in the world” — to quote Mahatma Gandhi.

First let me document what we are doing to our personal health. According to data complied by the Centers for Disease Control released on June 16, 2010 and published in Medscape Today, “obesity and diagnosed cases of diabetes among adults … are at their highest levels since the government began compiling these data.” This study states nearly three of ten Americans over the age of 20 are medically obese, defined as a body mass index of 30 kg/m2 or more, and nearly one in ten American adults have been diagnosed with diabetes. As Eric Schlosser pointed out in the film Food, Inc. this is not a problem of over consumption. Humans are hardwired to crave refined sugar and fats; and modern ‘fast foods’ and ‘processed foods’ are ‘super-sized’ with those ingredients we crave in their most unhealthy forms — mainly from corn and its industrial bi-products. Consuming over-refined industrial food products is not the only way in which our health is compromised by the industrial/corporate food system.

We face long-term health risks directly associated with the production methods used in growing vast quantities of identical industrial food commodities for the mass market. To maximize profits while minimizing expenses requires devoting thousands and thousands of acres of farmland to a limited number of high-profit crops. This practice causes those monocultured crops to strip essential nutrients from the soil and makes those crops unnaturally vulnerable to an ever-evolving array of predators. Replenishing the soil requires massive use of synthetic fertilizers, while protecting these unnatural single crop bio-cultures requires massive use of ever-more toxic pesticides. Despite all the disclaimers issued by government agencies and industrial farmers, the artificial chemicals and deadly pesticides remain within our foodsupply in significant quantities. “The U.S. Centers for Disease reports that one of the main sources of pesticide exposure for U.S. children comes from the food they eat,” (Food Inc. 104) the Organic Consumers Association informs us in “Exposure to Pesticides.” These toxic chemicals have long-term, harmful impacts. “According to the EPA’s ‘Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment,’ children receive fifty percent of their lifetime cancer risks in the first two years of life” and these “standard chemicals are up to ten times more toxic to children than to adults” (Food Inc. 103). Thus to rationalize its profits our industrial food system willingly puts our young children, the most defenseless of us, at the highest health risk. Since in most cases cancer takes decades to manifest, consumers don’t typically see the direct relationship between poisonous food and poisoned bodies. This is not the case with food pathogens where illness and death occur soon after ingestion.

The economies of scales required to provide our nation’s food through a small number of monopolistic manufacturers inevitably makes the manufacturing process the place deadly pathogens enter the food chain. From the CDC website:
In the United States, food-borne diseases have been estimated to cause 6 million to 81 million illnesses and up to 9,000 deaths each year… more than 200 known diseases are transmitted through food … viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins, metals, and prions, and the symptoms … range from mild gastroenteritis to life-threatening neurologic, hepatic, and renal syndromes.”
Because we have encouraged and tolerated the industrialization of our foodways, this has turned that which sustains us into one of the more dangerous risks we face on a daily basis. This is a recent and terrible change to how our food is brought to market. A “few companies have managed, in the last forty years to take over a major segment of American society and are now doing everything they can to maintain and extend that power, including controlling our access to information about their activities” (Food Inc. 38), Robert Kenner tells us in “Exploring the Corporate Power Behind the Way We Eat.” While these multinational corporations do everything in their power to conceal the health dangers in the food we consume on a daily basis, because they operate across national boundaries, because they place profits above health or national security, their business and agricultural practice s put more at risk than our immediate personal health.

The growing global population demands resources, both food and mineral, beyond that which we have been able to produce. At the same time agricultural productivity is being diminished by global warming and depletion of soil resources, and by reduced crop diversity. This is a recipe for resource wars: “The 21st century will be shaped not just by competitive economic growth, but also by potentially disruptive scarcities — depletion of minerals; desertification of land; pollution or overuse of water; weather changes that kill fish and farms,” Thom Shanker warns us in the New York Times. From industrial powerhouses like China to failed states like Somalia, the ever increasing demand for resources inevitably leads to local and international conflict: “[China’s] voracious appetite for minerals has at times set it at odds with the West over policies toward countries like Sudan and Iran, whose oil it buys,” continues Shanker. For most of the last decade the US has rattled its military saber at Iran. Perhaps the biggest factor protecting Iran from the world’s largest, most expensive, and most bellicose military power is that any attack on Iran will be interpreted as an attack on China, a much more dangerous foe. At the other end of the scale, the devastation of Somalia’s natural resources, by industrial-scale foreign fishing operations for example, has opened up new occupational opportunities for Somalia’s former farmers and fisherman, piracy: “Somalian pirates are fishermen who can no longer make a living in waters depleted by overfishing,” Shanker notes. “Meanwhile, arable land and water supplies have been drying up, increasing poverty and driving farmers off the land. These shifts have only fed civil conflict and warlordism.” These examples are “canaries in the coalmine,” current agricultural, business and governmental practices will increase these disturbances as our planet becomes less hospitable to this form of agriculture.

The manner in which we produce food is unhealthy for our planet and plays a major role in global warming and the subsequent human devastation these environmental changes will entail. In “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork,” Anna Lappé informs us:
…the global system for producing and distributing food accounts for roughly one-third of the human caused global warming effect. According to the United Nations’ report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, the livestock sector alone is responsible for eighteen percent of the world’s total global warming effect — more than the emissions produced by every plane, train, and steamer ship on the planet. (Food Inc. 106)
As the news media tell us on a daily basis, global warming is more than a ‘theory,’ it is becoming an ever-present global catastrophe — from an epidemic of wild fires throughout the American west this summer to Category 5 hurricanes drowning New Orleans, from a flooded Panama Canal this week to the nearly 12 million hectares lost each year to desertification every year (according to the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development … and the rate is increasing). These bad industrial agricultural practices cause a myriad of problems “including worsening air quality, depletion of our water resources, pollution of our water resources, and worsening greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s just a partial list” (Food Inc. 93), Robert Bryce informs us in “The Ethanol Scam — Burning Food to Make Motor Fuel.” Clearly the problems are evident and immediate, so what can we do to stop the madness?

Historically citizens looked to the government to protect us from the deadly machinations of large institutions and destructive nations. Unfortunately, our government is inadequate to this task due to its complicity: “This situation is not sustainable, nor is it accidental. … it can be traced back to governmental policies designed to produce the very system that now distorts agricultural production in this country” (Food Inc. 129), Arturo Rodriguez tells us in “Cheap Food: Workers Pay the Price.” Robert Kenner, film director of Food, Inc., agrees, stating that the power of these industrial food corporations is unchecked “thanks to the intimate connections these corporations have with the government” (Food Inc. 36). While there are grassroots organizations working to counter the undue influence of these international corporations, for example as of December 6, 2010, over 150,000 Americans signed a Food Democracy Now! petition demanding the US Justice Department use existing anti-monopoly laws to break up the corporate food megaliths, the need is more immediate and the results are more reliable if we take matters into our own hands. We can “become the change we wish to see in the world,” and the answers are readily available and almost painfully obvious.

As livestock is a major cause of environmental degradation and pestilence in our food supply, simply reducing the amount of meat we eat would reduce obesity, diabetes, our exposure to food pathogens, and global warming! “Choosing to eat less meat, or eliminating meat entirely, is one of the most important personal choices we can make to address climate change, states [Dr. Rajendra] Pachauri [chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]” (Food Inc. 107) in “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork.” Eating less livestock directly translates into less environmental pollution and reduced environment impacst while improving our health options.

By planting a small garden in our yards (or apartment patios and decks) or by joining a local community garden we can reduce not only our exposure to pesticides and food pathogens, we can also reduce the manufacturing and transportation-related carbons created by moving food (on average 1,500 miles) from where it is grown to where it is eaten.

By using a bus or walking to the local farmer’s market to shop for local, sustainably-grown food rather than driving to the not-so-super food emporium we can maintain the small farmer tradition while reducing our ingestion of pesticides and chemicals, reducing our carbon foot print, and reducing our support for an industrialized food system that is killing us.

Supporting small scale, sustainable farms in or near our communities ensures our ‘food security,’ alters the dominant paradigm, and makes for a healthier planet: “organic farming increased biodiversity at ‘every level of the food chain’ from birds and mammals, to flora, all the way down to the bacteria in the soil” (Food Inc. 116) Lappé tells us.

These simple lifestyle choices, which each of us is capable of making without additional expense and without the involvement of the greater community, will directly insure that we are eating less food that is unhealthy for us, that we are eating less food containing dangerous pathogens and chemicals, that we are building a local infrastructure that insures reliable local food access, that creates local jobs, that creates less pollution while improving the livability of our own community and biosphere. All this and you get to smash the dominant paradigm of corporate dominance and industrial solutions to local human problems. And isn’t this the way we would chose to live if we had a choice? We have a choice.

Works Cited

Crane, Mark. “Obesity and Diabetes on the Rise, CDC Survey Finds.” Medscape Today. June 16, 2010. December 8, 2010. Web.

Food Inc. prod. Participant Media. In-class presentation. 2009. Film

International Fund for Agricultural Development. Desertification. August, 2010. December 8, 2010. Web.

Mead, Paul S and Laurence Slutsker, Vance Dietz, Linda F. McCaig, Joseph S. Bresee, Craig Shapiro, Patricia M. Griffin, and Robert V. Tauxe. “Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Newsletter. September 15, 1999. December 8, 2010. Web.

Shanker, Thom. “Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition.” New York Times. December 8, 2010. December 16, 2010. Web

Weber, Karl. Food, Inc: how industrial food is making us sicker, fatter, and poorer — and what you can do about it. New York: Public Affairs, 2009. Print.

Killing Public Education

2010-11-07T11:37:00.000-08:00

No Child Gets A Free Education

If the desire to solve educational disparities through legislation like the Leave No Child Behind Act (LNCB) was part of a noble effort offering the children of our nation better educational opportunities to improve their lives, than we would be aspiring to ideals proposed by Thomas Paine and officially instituted when the first taxpayer-funded public school in the United States was authorized by the citizens of Dedham, Massachusetts in 1643. But if the real goal is to end free universal public education and dismantle the system that made it possible, as I believe, than LNCB is just the latest slickly misnamed tool dedicated to destroying one of the founding institutions of our nation. Is this some far-fetched paranoid fantasy? Hardly. United States v. National City Lines Inc tells us that America’s once ubiquitous urban public transit agencies were deliberately acquired and dismantled by private profit-driven corporations under similar circumstances. In that 1949 case, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, General Motors and Mack Trucks, and their agents, were accused and convicted of acquiring and dismantling “46 transportation systems located in 45 cities in 16 states.” Looking at NCLB’s results as detailed in Many Children Left Behind by Deborah Meier, et al, and other sources, and acknowledging the considerable economic and political forces allied against free universal public education as it has existed for almost 300 years, and it seems very much like privatization is the goal, and I’m not the only person claiming this.

Diane Ravitch, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and former Assistant Secretary of Education during President “Papa Doc” Bush’s administration, also tells free universal public education is under assault. “Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education,” Ravitch states in her article “Will Public Education Survive the Embrace of Big Money?” published in Education Week. Ravitch identifies a few of the monied power brokers attacking free universal public education, including the Gates Foundation (MicroSoft), the Broad Foundation (Kaufman & Broad Homes and American International Group), and the Walton Foundation (Wal-Mart). On May 5, 2010, Philanthropy Journal added JP-Morgan-Chase to that list with its $325 million investment in the charter-school business. From the Associated Press we learn in a recent article published in the Deseret News that “Entertainment Properties Inc., known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries, recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for $170 million,” and L. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm behind Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com and Google launched NewSchools Venture Fund ten years ago specifically to fund alternatives to public education. Another of the big players invested in restructuring America’s educational system is Democrats for Education Reform, “a political action committee supported largely by hedge fund managers” according to the website DFER Watch. That site also identified Steven Klinsky, CEO and founder of New Mountain Capital, and Peter Ackerman, a former member of the Cato Institute‘s Board of Directors, as major DFER funders. Both Klinsky and Ackerman are closely affiliated with the Republican Party’s most restrictive anti-public education constituencies.

There’s a reason these billionaires and venture capitalists want into the education business, in the Associate Press article above we learn these for-profit institutions want public funding. Jeanne Allen, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform insists “states and individual school districts ultimately must … allow charters to use bonds and other public construction funds or give them more money to build their own facilities.” Allen is not the only private charter school supporter planning on feeding deep from the public trough, the Texas State Board of Education plans to spend $100 million of its $22.1 billion Permanent School Fund on vacant shopping malls to house charter schools, suggesting the permanent endowment “might earn eight percent” on this investment by leasing those empty shopping malls to charter schools. The article didn’t inform the reader that shopping malls have been a poor investment since the economic collapse of 2001, as malls across America go in foreclosure or become bank-owned.

Normally national stature politicians would be expected to protect this vital American institution, unfortunately the Republican Party is running currently on an agenda which includes the destruction of universal free education. "I'd start by eliminating the U.S. Department of Education," Utah Republican Senate nominee Mike Lee is quoted in Think Progress just days before the national election. Lee is hardly alone in this outlandish demand. Nevada's Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle insists “its not the federal government's job to provide education for our children,” and promises to unfund all federal education mandates. This is not just the thinking of the Republican Party fringe, currently more than 111 Republican members of Congress or candidates who have stated their support for abolishing the US Department of Education. Nor is this a new phenomenon, in1996, the Republican Party platform declared: “The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” Where elected Republican officials, such as would-be Presidential-candidate Michael Bloomberg have control over local government these goals are being actively pursued. Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York City’s “Department of Education has closed nearly 100 regular public schools and replaced them with charter schools or new schools,” Ravitch tells us.

Key to destroying public education has been the transformation of America’s once revered public educational institutions. The first step in this process was Brown v. Board of Education which made integration of public schools the law of the land, however the reluctant nation didn’t experience integration until Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education mandated busing.

“Though public schools were technically desegregated in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, many were still de facto segregated due to inequality in housing and racial segregation in neighborhoods. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of busing to end school segregation and dual school systems, on Charlotte, North Carolina and other cities nationwide to affect student assignment based on race and to attempt to further integrate schools.”

When white parents saw a proportional increase in the number of children of different colors in the classroom, white flight began. Here in the East Bay white families moved to new developments in former agricultural lands such as Walnut Creek and further east, while others moved north to developments in Marin’s former agricultural lands. Many of those who remained placed their children in parochial or private schools, reducing the number of affluent white children in the public schools, and parents who could afford to donate time, money and political connections to keep the quality of local education at levels competitive for the limited number of student spots at prestigious colleges. The removal of white children from public schools increased the proportion of children of other ethnic identities, exacerbating the situation to the de facto segregation seen in many local public schools today. Concurrent with white flight was the increased resistance to public education. Parents spending $1,000 to $2,500 per month, per child, on segregated private schools complained about the high tax burden of public education. The national renaissance of nativist evangelical Christianism exacerbated the situation with its intolerance for other religious beliefs, abortion, single mothers, and gay rights. These wedge issues were used by the Republican party and corporate opportunists to disparage public education. This did not happen in a vacuum. Lobbyists, propagandists and political operatives were paid substantial sums of money to deliberately stoke the flames of intolerance. Richard Berman, aka “Doctor Evil,” of Washington, DC.-based Berman and Company is one such lobbyist paid millions of dollars a year by Tyson Foods, Wendy’s International, Arby’s, Hooters, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and other corporations and wealthy individuals to disseminate anti-consumer and anti-teacher propaganda through shadow organizations such as “The Center for Union Facts” and “Teachers Union Exposed.” As of May 2009, Berman and Company runs at least fifteen corporate-funded shadow groups created to sway public perceptions. Although his allegations are almost universally disputed, he is frequently cited as an authority on education in the national media, and he is encouraged to published opinion pieces criticizing public education.

Against this well-funded and highly organized effort to destroy universal free public education in America, LNCB, and its honest supporters have little chance of substantially improving education for the vast majority of economically disadvantaged students in the face of a society that embraces racial segregation and economic oppression. While privatized schools receive excellent reviews in the media, the educational results have been mixed at best. Again, Ravitch tells us, this time in the Los Angeles Times, “there is a widespread impression that any charter school is better than any public school. This is not true. Charter schools vary in quality from excellent to abysmal.” When charter schools are able to show substantially improved results, those results typically come from small, well-funded, homogenous population schools which cherry-pick the best students. Again Ravitch puts it best:

“One of the major arguments for turning schools over to private managers is that the resulting competition will spur improvements in the public schools. This did not happen in Philadelphia, nor is there evidence that it has happened elsewhere. Many charter and privately managed schools get extra resources and smaller classes with the help of corporate sponsors, but public schools typically do not. What the public schools do get are the low-performing and disruptive students who are ejected by or eased out of the charter and privately managed schools.”

It seems the two real benefits to privatization are private profits from the public tills for the corporations that own and manage these schools, and racial segregation. These types of schools have always existed in America but it used to be that they were called private schools, now they’re called ‘charter’ schools. It used to be that America stood for equal opportunity for all its citizens, but now the cherished rights enumerated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights seemed to be set aside just to benefit the rich and the white.

WORKS CITED
Flanigan, James, “Venture Capitalists Are Investing in Educational Reform,” New York Times. February 16, 2006 web.

Grannan, Caroline “Former GOP insider: Billionaire Boys' Club dismantling public education.” SF Examiner/Education. March 25, 2009. Web. Oct. 25, 2010.

Keyes, Scott. Think Progress. “111 Republican Incumbents And Candidates Want To Eliminate The Department Of Education” Oct. 29, 2010. Web. Oct. 30, 2010.

Libby, Ken. “About DFER Watch.” DFER Watch. July 11, 2010. Web. Oct. 30, 2010

Meier, Deborah, and George Wood, Alfie Kohn, Linda Darling-Hammond, Theodore R. Sizer. Many Children Left Behind. Boston. Beacon Press, 2004.

Noguera, Pedro. “A New Vision of School Reform.” The Nation. June 14, 2010. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Philanthropy Journal. “JPMorgan Chase investing in charter schools,” May 5, 2010. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Ravitch, Diane. “Will Public Education Survive the Embrace of Big Money?” Education Week. Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“Charter and private schools might not make the grade either.” Los Angeles Times. Aug. 11, 2009. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Scharrer, Gary. “State mulls investing in charter schools,” Express News/My San Antonio. May 1, 2010. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Think Progress. “The Progress Report: ELECTION: An Extreme Makeover” Oct. 30, 2010. Web. Oct. 30, 2010

Twiddy, David. “Private sector investing in charter schools.” Associated Press/Deseret News. Sept. 8, 2009. Web. Oct. 25, 2010

United States Supreme Court. “United States v. National City Lines Inc.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Wikipedia. “Brown v. Board of Education.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“Dedham, Massachusetts.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“Desegregation busing in the United States.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“The Great American Streetcar Scandal.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010
“Richard Berman/Teachers Union Exposed/Center for Union Facts.” Web. Oct. 25, 2010

Responding to "Living In Sin" by Adrienne Rich.

2010-09-26T21:55:00.000-07:00

Living in Sin
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own---
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
by Adrienne Rich (1955)

The Inevitable Burden of Dreaming of a Better World
by Fred Dodsworth (2010)

In Mid 20th Century America, the opportunities Adrienne Rich had to exercise her intellectual and creative talents were claustrophobically constrained. While her husband pursued an academic career at a prestigious institution, Rich’s options were restricted to the domestic: “Kinder, Küche, and Kirche.”* Poetry afforded her the opportunity to plunder life for images, situations and feelings she used to speak strongly and aesthetically to her concerns. Written in one long stanza divided into seven vignettes, this poem uses eroticized imagery juxtaposed with crude descriptions and subtle religious references to explore what it meant to be a woman. “Living in Sin” contrasts the idyllic fantasy of a romantic relationship with the harsh reality of a sidelined, disempowered woman and insists we look beneath the molding, to confront the grimy, vermin-infested culture that restricts women.

“She had thought the studio would keep itself/no dust upon the furniture of love,” we’re told in the first line, identifying the poem’s narrator: woman, individual and collectively; tone: disappointed; and condition: dirty and oppressed. These remain consistent throughout the work and contrast with the poem’s persistent romantic/erotic charge. Strong sibilance and long E-sounds sing us into the text while weak implicatures tell us to “study” the poem and recognize the conflict between erotic impulse and women’s restricted roles. The dusty “furniture of love” foreshadows estrangement and the alliterative “half heresy” and the title; “Living in Sin,” encourage the reader to consider the influence of traditional religious values. Last Rich draws attention to the dirty panes and noisy taps. Symbolically the plaintive tone of the plumbing references woman’s complaints with her plight and trouble, out of sight in this ostensibly idyllic scene. Similarly, dirty windows suggest visible signs of distress in plain sight while allowing Rich to neatly use the homonym “panes” to suggest her suffering while reinforcing the conflict over “women’s work.”

Rich increases the erotic charge in the second vignette and set us up for the social/ sexual conflict of the milkman in the third. Continuing the playful alliterative P sounds started with “panes,” the poet presents a pear — symbol of woman’s sexual availability — and a piano. She reinforces this sexualized imagery with a cat and the alliterative moaning sound of “amusing mouse,” more symbols of female sexuality. Calling the mouse “picturesque” continues the alliterative P while referencing the socio-cultural meme which encourages women to be ‘picture pretty” sexual objects. Making the cat and mouse respond to “his urgings,” the author crafts lustful imagery that is immediately reactive to the masculine presence. She shatters this erotic reverie with the entrance of an ambiguous second male, the milkman with the sonically rapidly moving: “Not that at five each separate stair would writhe/under the milkman’s tramp.” The milkman is a complex figure because his entrance at five signals the new day and its social responsibilities more than his erotic possibilities while deliberately evoking the cliché of milkmen as sexual partners. Such word choices as “writhe/under,” in which “writhe” is stressed by “five,” and the carefully coupled “milkman’s tramp” allow us to question Rich’s intention.** Is she sabotaging the sexual primacy of her lover/husband?† Is she alluding to lustful feelings toward another? The poem does not tell us but the resonant inference allows us to wonder. Blocking the milkman’s entrance with a semicolon, Rich darkens the tone of this third vignette by using the brightness of the “morning’s light” to coldly “delineate the scraps/of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles.” The feast of the night before confronts the morning after and the death of love. The three gravestone-like bottles suggest the three crosses of Calvary Hill, which overlaid Aphrodite’s Temple of Love. Modern Christian values force “her,” a priestess in Aphrodite’s temple, to abandon egalitarian hierogamy and become a janitor. Her failure is witnessed by “a pair of beetle-eyes.” The disturbing image of a beetle standing amongst the saucers moves the poem into the kitchen and the fourth vignette.

The following powerful tableaux symbolically depict “woman’s” degraded social status. The kitchen and saucers serve metonymical for the distaff world, in this case polluted by the foulness of a beetle. Worse, it is not a singular beetle but “an envoy from some village in the moldings” with its eyes fixed unto “her own,” representing the collective judgment of the other, all who would see and judge woman for household disarray, including the insect infestation itself. As woman she’s accountable without regard to her other obligations, dreams or desires. He is not. This is most powerfully exemplified in the following:
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes.
By devoting four lines to his desultory response Rich gives great weight to “his” lack of remedial action. Whereas she must confront the dishabille of their shared home and the judgment of the studio’s insect colony, he passes judgment upon her. Up until this point his only action has been to urge on the cat and mouse, with all the inherently explicit sexual connotations that image provoked. Now he yawns. Worse, “he… sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard/declared it out of tune.” The piano becomes a stand in for “her” and she has been found wanting or “out of tune.” His dismissal is then accentuated by gazing into the mirror and shrugging. These are the physical actions of a man who doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter that in the real world we all yawn and shrug or belch and fart. In this context his yawn and shrug say she is inconsequential. Then he “rubbed at his beard.” In addition to stressing his maleness, “to beard” someone is to confront them in their territory, to insult them Bartleby.com tells us. In the fourth vignette she is confronted in her symbolic territory, the kitchen, in the fifth she is insulted and dismissed. Rich closes this scene with abandonment as he “went out for cigarettes.”

As this emotionally devastating image of chastisement resonates, the poet forces us to acknowledge the many forces brought to bear to insure female compliance. Metaphorically the jeering “minor demons” in the penultimate vignette echo the “village in the moldings” in the fourth, and represent every woman’s internal self-criticism plus the social pressures compelling women to succumb to the distaff realm. At the same time “minor demons” reference religion’s role in forcing women into this compromise. To fail to acquiesce to her lot in life, to a life of subordination and obedience to her husband, is to dispute God’s Plan, a sin.

The final two scenes return us to a world where women acquiesce to their “obligations” and love their men, but there is trouble in Paradise. In the penultimate vignette the protagonist falls to task, making beds, dusting tables, and boiling coffee, all the while expressing implicit resistance with an erotic subtext. She does not just make the bed, “she pulls back the sheets” to reveal what has been hidden, encouraging us to examine the pathology that links Eros and “Cleanliness, which is next to Godliness.” Similarly the coffee is made, but “boil(s) over on the stove,” the stove metonymically representing woman, her sexuality, even her genitalia.†† She is coming to a boil and spilling out everywhere. Sonically the poem speeds up with short words utilizing sibilance and brisk t-sounds and spondees “table-top” and “coffee-pot” to further accelerate the poem while again tying domestic obligations to sexuality. Rich resolves the final vignette with a return to love but tempered. “By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly.” This rich homonymic word choice references a lack of wholeness, the incompleteness of the profoundly constricted female experience, and the disconnect between holy sexuality and oppressive gender restrictions. Love is under siege. Now she “feel(s) the daylight coming,” the ominous image of “a relentless milkman up the stairs” suggests stern consequences are coming as well.

The world has changed dramatically in the 55 years since “Living in Sin” was published. After the 1960s “Women’s Movement,” the distaff half now dominates in colleges and the workforce, and every day more and more women hold the highest reins of power from politics to business. This is true in fields as diverse as journalism and medicine. That said men and women today are as full of “Strum und Drang” around “Women’s Roles” and sexuality as they have been at any time in recent history. National figures like Carly Fiornia make catty comments about her opponents hairstyle’s, national journalists discuss Hillary Clinton’s clothing choices, and men wonder why women aren’t more sexually aggressive (when they’re not “hysterical” about modern woman’s sexually aggressivity), and the “Church” is as eager as ever to weigh in on women’s roles.††† Perhaps the biggest change is that as women have moved into every higher positions of authority they have become women’s most ardent critics. The war on women is no longer man’s alone, now women have taken up arms to restrict women’s freedoms, too.

*Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, “Children, Kitchen and Church,” a phrased widely and dismissively used to indicate the distaff realm.

**While one could argue that the phrase milkman’s tramp is simply referring to the sound the milkman makes walking up the stairs in the mid 1950s, the time of this poem, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald revitalized a hit song that had been repeatedly popular since the 1930s with their version of the “The Lady Is A Tramp.”

† The reader is allowed to assume the primary persona is the poet. Rich was married with child in 1955 when this poem was written.

†† By example, the common phrase indicating pregnancy: “She has a bun in the oven.”

††† See “The Danvers Statement” by The (Baptist) Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: Proclaiming God’s Glorious Design for Men & Women, or the Catholic Church’s annual denunciations of birth control, or the Taliban’s crimes against women for just a few of the many, many examples.

© Fred Dodsworth. September 26, 2010

Deja Vu all over again.

2010-09-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

Just before the 2004 elections I interviewed Congressman George Miller (D-California, 7th Congressional District). Depressingly, the conversation we had then is as timely and relevant today as it was then.

Congressman George Miller: All right, all right. The battle never ends (sighs).
Dodsworth: No it doesn't. That's probably a great way to start. The battle never ends. Both on a state level and a national level our country is facing many crisises. What keeps you up at night? What makes it hard to sleep?
Congressman Miller: What keeps me up at night? Oh, hell. There's just… Nothing.

Dodsworth: Nothing?
Congressman Miller: What generally keeps me up at night is the anticipation of what has to be done. You know, just the volume of work and things that have to be accomplished. All of which are part of those things, whether it's trying to review and figure out what the hell is actually going on in Iraq. Or what's happening in my jurisdictions, and, and what's happening with people's unemployment benefits. Are they going to be cut off? Are they going to be given an extension or not. How do we re-think our manufacturing base. How do we re-think federal investments in advanced research and development …to obesity in school children to… you know.

I mean one of the good things about this job is that there's always something. (He chuckles ruefully.) You know this is not a job where today is like yesterday or tomorrow will be like today. But it weighs on you. It weighs on you. And right now, for a long time, we've seen a fairly sluggish economy, a lot of people unemployed.
You see young kids losing their life in Iraq. There's a lot of… things that… that you know that… Things that could have maybe been done differently that would have protected some of those kids. But the rush to war didn't allow that kind of planning because we were so driven to get in and get Saddam Hussein, without thinking. So we now see more and more… even the Pentagon reports… saying that a lot of these kid's injuries and fatalities could have been avoid if they'd have been properly equipped.
So you think… Jesus… How did that happen? So, it's a mixed bag. It's a very mixed bag. There's not a problem that beats down on you in this business.

I take this job very seriously. I think of this as … I've been given one of the great privileges in our country — to participate. But there's a constant sense of responsibility, if you're going to do this job right. So I'm a good sleeper (laughs) but I also keep a note pad by my bed because I do wake up and think, 'oh, geeze! (he laughs comfortably). So it's, it's also an energy source because you know that you've been given the chance to contribute. You've been given the chance to participate in the governing of the country and so… there are things you've just got to do because they've got to get done.

Dodsworth: The GAO announced, a couple of days ago, that between 1996 and 2000, 61 percent of all major American corporations paid no income taxes.
Congressman Miller: (excited) I didn't see that story but we know that we know that the percentage of total taxes that corporations are paying rapidly decreasing.

Dodsworth: In 1960, twenty percent of all taxes paid, were paid by corporations. Today I think it's around four percent.
Congressman Miller: Um-huh. I don't know if that's a good measure. I don't know if that was the right figure in 1960, or today.

But I think you are getting to a situation where more and more of the responsibility for paying for whatever level of government we have is falling simply on wage earners. Because of the substantial reductions in taxation on dividends, on capital gains, on corporate taxation, a greater and greater percentage is falling on the person who is getting a paycheck week or every two weeks or every month. But they're getting a paycheck and withholding. They're the wage earner.

But those people who have investment income, who have passive income are paying a smaller and smaller percentage.

So here you have this big run up, $200 billion for this war on terrorism, for this war on Iraq, but who's paying for it?

At the beginning of this process, before 9-11, before the war, before Afghanistan, before Iraq, before "Homeland Security," we gave a massive tax cut, essentially to the wealthiest people in this country. Now we have this huge challenge to America, but only the middle-class are paying the bills. There's something wrong with that.
So those figures that you site, I think raise very serious questions about equity, fairness and the people's confidence in our tax code.

You know we have self-compliance. April 15th we mail in our taxes, and everybody does that and there's a sense that… but if you start to lose confidence in that tax system you'll end up like other countries where people say, 'I'm not doing to do this. This is unfair and I'm not going to participate.'
Fairness is something we have to be very, very careful about, in the tax code. And I think that we've gone to the point now, with the recent tax cuts, where fairness is not exactly… (laughter)… how you'd describe the tax code today.

Dodsworth: How would you describe it?
Congressman Miller: Unfair. Unfair and it's one tax code for the wealthiest people in the country and another tax code for middle income and lower income people.

Dodsworth: There seem to be enormous benefits accruing to the wealthiest people and the benefits are being cut at the lowest levels, and at the middle class.
This President came into office with program called, "Leave No Child Behind," and our state governor came into office with his education program, which he promised to stand behind. Yet our governor has cut the guaranteed funds to education, and from what I see, education doesn't seem to be getting funded on a national level, either.
Congressman Miller: Well, the President broke his promise. I was one of the authors of "Leave No Child Behind" and I think it's a very important piece of legislation but it hinges upon states and local school districts having sufficient money to bring about the reforms that are called for in the act, in terms of high standards, of assessments, of a qualified teacher in every classroom. We had long discussions with the President about the real cost of those reforms. We told him the kind of money we thought needed to be spent to bring that about. And he assured us that if we were able to pass those reforms, which I think everybody considered the most significant reforms in 35 years, in the federal role in education, that he would provide the resources. It's a five year bill, he provided the resources for one year and he hasn't provided the resources in the last couple of years. And that's had a serious impact in terms of the opportunities for real reform and for children doing better in their schools.

Dodsworth: Did he lie?
Congressman Miller: Well, when somebody breaks their promise to you, that's what I'd say.

Dodsworth: I'm 53, in my life I've near seen such adversity between the two parties that run this country. Republicans and Democrats. Do you concur with that?
Congressman Miller: Well, I think that most of the evidence suggests the country is fairly polarized. You had a presidential election that was 50-50. The popular vote went to Al Gore, the Supreme Court went for George Bush.

Dodsworth: The U.S. Supreme Court. The Florida Supreme Court did not. And it was on a straight party line vote [for The U.S. Supreme Court].
Congressman Miller: Yes. Most of the data you see today suggests that it's 50-50. Kerry and Bush are essentially tied. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It's clear that the President is a very, very fundamental, bedrock conservative, who really doesn't believe in most governmental services, from protecting the environment to protecting social security or Medicare. He's made it very clear. But there's a like number of people in the country that strongly believe there's a role for government in promoting well-being within our society. That's the struggle you see being played out in the campaign and in the Congress. The President wants to load up the courts with right-wing ideologue judges. And there's a lot of us who feel there should be some balance on the court. And so you have a serious split in the United States Senate. You have a serious split in the House on education, on the environment, on the war in Iraq. On a whole range of issues.

Dodsworth: What can be done? What is that like to work with?
Congressman Miller: Well, that's the nature of democracy. In another system of government I guess you'd just come in and impose your views but that's the struggle of… that's what democracy is about.
This November, either the people will be concerned enough to go out an vote or they won't. We really don't get much voter participation in this country compared to so many other countries. Whether that's because people feel it doesn't make a difference or people feel the country is basically going OK or not remains to be seen but… in democracy you don't get to just end the debate. The debate continues so the struggle continues.

This is now… this polarization has been happening over the last several years. It's very hard to try to… you know, I passed one of the few bi-partisan bills, or two of the biggest bi-partisan bills. One in the area of environmental protection, one in the area of education. But there hasn't been much of that in the Congress.

It's rare. It's harder and harder. Tom Delay really doesn't want… the Republican leader in the House really doesn't want to work with Democrats. He wants to do it his way and he waits until he can get enough Republican votes, and then (he) passes it. And he doesn't want debate. He doesn't allow debate. He doesn't allow amendments. He doesn't allow public hearings on those efforts. And so there really is a desire… he said he really is looking for one-party government! He'd like to crush the Democrats so he could just do it his way with even less public input or debate or what have you. But that's really not the tradition or history of our country.

It's supposed to be a public process … how you make the laws and govern this country. You're supposed to have the debates and protect the rights of the minority in the government so they can put forth a view that may be different than the majority. But then you vote and that's fine. You don't get to win every vote or lose every vote. Whatever. But that's not what's happening here. They're really trying to take over the government, for one party, from the White House to the Senate to the Congress.

It's not me who is saying this. People who are Congressional scholars or Presidential scholars are looking at what's going on here and it's pretty clear. But again, that's why we'll have an election in November. That's why you see probably the highest level of energy turning out for the Democratic party, and people opposed to George Bush, that I've seen in decades. That's the process. That's the process.

America’s Culture Wars Poison the News

2010-09-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

On September 4, 2010 San Francisco-based Craigslist, an international computerized listing service, posted a ‘Censored’ banner over its Adult Services section in response to legal actions threatened by 18 state Attorneys General. This Craigslist section typically offered legal sexual services available for a fee. By Monday afternoon, September 6th approximately 1500 articles had been posted on Google News regarding Craigslist’s action. I examined two of these articles for bias. Established women reporters working for national news organizations working from wire copy authored both articles. A direct comparison of these two news stories illustrates the growing problem of the deliberate use of biased news to promote cultural values rather than objectively inform the public.

The MS-NBC story, filed by Athima Chansanchai, focused on legal and Constitutional issues raised by this action, as well as practical business and technical aspects of running Adult Services advertisements. Chansanchai appeared to avoid making personal value judgments about the moral and societal implications of offering legal sexual services for sale. She included the results of a survey of “more than 1,800” members of the Mashable social media site wherein more than 70% of those surveyed objected to the censoring of Craigslist’s Adult Services section and then qualified that by noting that the vast majority of those respondents favored changing the laws to legalize prostitution. Chansanchai also cited several reports appearing in other established reputable publications, including a national article in the New York Times that questioned “the possible free speech ramifications of the decision,” and a local article from the San Francisco Chronicle, quoting a UC Berkeley law professor who said this censorship “would likely result in the takedown of what might otherwise be perfectly legitimate free expression.” Other recognized authorities on issues of protected speech and the particular problems inherent in social media and internet technology were also quoted in Chansanchai’s piece.

In comparison the CNN article, with reporting by Deborah Doft and Nicky Robertson, focused almost exclusively on the salacious ‘immorality’ of sex for sale; and what the reporters implied were the ‘natural’ results of legalize prostitution, including child prostitution, female enslavement, and death. Further calling into question the integrity of their report, they used this news story as an implicit endorsement of the candidacy and ideology of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is running for US Senate. Doft/Robertson’s article leaned almost exclusively on commentary from Blumenthal, featured him exclusively in the first half of the article and predominantly in eight out of the article’s 27 paragraphs. Blumenthal was quoted approvingly as announcing that this is a “significant apparent step in the right direction,” and as saying, “these prostitution ads enable human trafficking and assaults on women.” The reporters also quoted him stating that if he was elected to the U.S. Senate he would try to change federal laws to make it easier to prosecute sites like Craigslist.

As a further example of the deliberate bias of the Doft/Robertson article, the reporters distorted a comment from a Craigslist spokesperson to make it appear that the computerized listing service agreed with Mr. Blumenthal’s actions. Doft/Robertson wrote “A Craigslist spokeswoman said at the time that the site agreed with at least some of the letter,” and quoted from a Craigslist press release: “‘We strongly support the attorneys general desire to end trafficking in children and women, through the internet or by any other means,’ said Susan MacTavish.” A more logical interpretation is not that MacTavish is agreeing with Blumenthal’s complaint, she is simply stating that Craigslist is also concerned about the illegal marketing of women and child prostitutes, and supports the legal enforcement of existing laws against such trafficking. Doft/Robertson implied that this was a newsworthy change in Craigslist’s policy, but offered no evidence to substantiate that Craigslist previously held a different opinion. Further the Doft/Robertson article gave very little play to the fact that the company had committed considerable sums of money and energy to ensure that Craigslist isn’t used for illegal purposes (which we learned from the Chansanchai article).

The emotional tone of the Doft/Robertson article was self-congratulatory and judgmental and the reporters used quotes to support their smug perspective. Other than Blumenthal, the reporters only quoted other CNN reporters, including the ironically named Amber Lyon — a typical prostitute-styled nom de guerre — who advertised herself on Craigslist offering illegal sexual services for sale. Their article also quoted several people who were inadequately identified including a prostitute named “Jessica,” and two unnamed and otherwise unidentified “girls” who claimed they were sold for sex on Craigslist. By not adequately identifying their sources Doft/Robertson make it impossible to verify these allegations. By quoting fellow reporters, including one who offered illegal sexual services, the news service became the subject of the story rather than the reporter. To further emotionally load its sensationalistic and sordid tale, Doft/Robertson resurrected Philip Markoff, the now dead serial murderer who targeted at least one of his victims from her Craigslist advertisement. Then the reporters literally ended their tale with a report CNN did two years ago, stating Craigslist had “more than 7,000 ads in a single day. Many offered thinly veiled ‘services’ for anything from $50 for a half-hour to $400 an hour.”

In comparison the Chansanchai article focused on Constitutional, technical and business issues and she did not quote the Connecticut Attorney General running for US Senate. Additionally Chansanchai sought the opinion of several lawyers who specialized in such legal actions, and who disagreed with the legal interpretation offered by the candidate for Senate, and the various state Attorneys General who had joined in his threatened legal action. Ms Chansanchai also garnered the opinions of other media reporters, and she detailed the considerable expense and effort Craigslist has expended in combating illicit and illegal activity in its Adult Services section. While mentioning the Philip Markoff case, she questioned whether the censoring action would be effective at curbing what she referred to as “the world’s oldest profession,” especially in light of the growing market for such services, which she reported were expected to triple in revenues this year over last. Chansanchai noted that such services as Craigslist offered in its ‘Adult Services’ section are currently advertised in other media, including local newspapers, local telephone directories, flyers, post cards and by other internet providers, and she quoted a press release issued by CEO Jim Buckmaster stating that Craigslist’s restrictions on such advertisements “are stricter than those typically used by (The Yellow Pages), newspapers, or any other company that we are aware of.”

In the end, whatever action Craigslist takes, the sexual services on offer will not cease to exist, and will continue to be best legally enforced by local law enforcement and judiciary, reflecting the ideal of ‘local community standards’ incorporated into the American legal system. That said, this distortion of the news reflects an on-going cultural war in which one side desires to restrict legal human sexual behaviors. Driving the restrictive impulse are the moral and religious concerns of that portion of our society, which is at odds with the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and which is adverse to the personal beliefs and interests of another large element of our society. While both sides are reasonably utilizing the judicial and legislative processes to drive the narrative and their agendas, using the news media to distort the issues is a form of corrosive propaganda, which is profoundly destructive to the intended role of the media as objective protector of our democratic institutions and practices.

1) Chansanchai, Athima. (2010, Sept 6). CRAIGSLIST'S 'ADULT SERVICES' DECISION A BLOW TO FREE SPEECH? MSNBC/Tima Media. Web. Retrieved from

2) Doft, Deborah and Nicky Robertson, & CNN Wire Staff. (2010, Sept 5). CRITIC PRAISES CRAIGSLIST MOVE TO CENSOR ADS, CALLS FOR MORE INFO. CNN. Web. Retrieved from

A Persimmon Tree at Eventide.

2010-09-08T23:06:00.000-07:00

I remember planting this tree. The bark was smooth and the trunk slim back then, when my children were still small and my wife and I were not long married. Now the coarse surface of my ever hopeful Hachiya Persimmon is gnarled and rugged, its rough trunk twisted and deformed by my naïve pruning experiments. I call this tree hopeful because I hope to reap its fruit, which is botanically known as Diospyros, literally the ‘Fruit of the Gods’ — although Fruit of the Squirrels is more like it. Every season a scatter of pale green blossoms grace it, most resolving into small hard green fruit as the season progresses. For some reason much of that fruit plunges to the ground long before the summer sun settles its brilliant orange into the soft juicy flesh of this true berry. Still, come Fall, there are usually good numbers of not-yet-orange globes hanging from my tree. As the persimmon’s leaves turn rust red and fall, the tree reveals its true treasure nearly ready for harvest. But most of these riches will go to the backyard squirrels that arduously cart them away before they ripen. I’m lucky if I harvest a half-dozen fruit out this great bounty.

Sitting in my backyard watching the earth nibble on the sun, listening to the hum of my beehive overhead to the north and the gentle clucking of my chickens to the south, it’s hard to accept that these days, my days, are winding down. I’ve never hated Winter. Its cold heart instills no fear in me. I’ve never needed Spring’s optimism and rebirth to warm me up. But now I know the passage of Time, and how brief is our moment in the sun, how transient the juicy wet mouthful of the flesh of fresh ripe fruit, and the promise of persimmons yet to come. That said, this Fall it’s good to be home. A hospital is no place to spend one’s waning days.

Everything changes in a moment. It’s a cliché, but true. One moment she felt a small, insignificant discomfort, the next my wife was surrounded by the immediate urgency of triage – an entire team of nurses and doctors singularly focused on keeping her alive. The intense professional commitment of those green-cloaked masters of the mystery of medicine was both reassuring and frightening. That she might need their undivided attention would have been a terrifying experience, if she had been in any condition to be cognizant of their ministrations. But cleverly they had already administered a simulacrum of morphine into her bloodstream to ensure that her growing awareness of this inconceivable pain was stunted. It wasn’t that she couldn’t feel the pain, it was there like an attentive lover who wouldn’t dare leave her side, but it was obscured in a fog of false memories and misunderstandings. “Where am I?,” she asked. “Why can’t I just go home?”

With her pain, if not abated at least misplaced, it was hard to explain to her why all this medical ritual was necessary. “I don't want to continue to participate in this medical test,” she actually said. She didn’t say: “Have I, through some deviousness, acquiesced to their treachery, now allowing them to perform unimaginable atrocities on my being, or am I still dreaming this?” but it was there in her eyes. My wife of 33 years was in the Emergency Room with a life-threatening condition brought on in a moment without warning. What I called my life was fluttering like a brown tree-dropped leaf lifted out of reach by a late summer gust.

Day slid sloppily into night and back into day again with only the bright lights of a three-ring circus, and lion tamers, and sword swallowers, and giant flaming rings of fire to divide one moment into the next, her circus tent from the one next. It’s 2 a.m. in the I.C.U. Time to light up tonight’s big show with gurneys and bells and beeps and shouts and screams and tubes running anywhere and everywhere. Incomprehensible growls and guttural grunts fill night’s darkest hours, for hours on end. It’s 3 a.m. Wake up, it’s time for your pain-pill. Do you feel any pain? It’s 4 a.m. Here’s a needle, let us jam it straight into your heart or maybe your brain. We will suckle on your fever dreams. It’s 5 a.m. Are you hungry? You can’t eat. Would you like some chips of ice? It’s 6 a.m. Time for Rounds. Mystery performers crowd the carnival, vying for attention, ignoring the dying. Who could know what transpires beneath the flesh in such circumstance? There, just under the skin, that which is most vital lays hidden from view, from knowing.

Was she there one day or one month, or was she even there at all? I could not say and in the end it did not matter. All the sacred ceremonies and magic concoctions were for naught. As it always is, in the end, it is just one person and the void, staring at each other, waiting for the unimaginable. In the end the professionals surrendered their powers, took off their costumes, put aside their potions and magic rattles and waited for whatever came next. In the end, it was time to go home.

Sitting in the eventide underneath my beautiful persimmon tree with its large, hard, shiny leaves of dark green, I listen to the chickens squabble, each testing the temporary supremacy of hierarchy in the henhouse while wild birds twitter and flitter from branch to branch, sneaking to steal such chicken scratch as might allow them to raise just one more fledgling to feather this year. It’s late and soon the moon will lord the night sky but while there’s still some sun left in the day the last flight of bees scurry from flower to flower in a mad dash to collect a little more nectar before they too must surrender to what bees call sleep. Their work was fruitful this year. The persimmons hang heavy and green from my tree. With some luck I might taste this harvest, too. I reach out and take her hand. It is good to be home.

©September 6, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

2010-09-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

I was named after a dead guy — worse than just dead, he committed suicide. In the early 20th Century Fred Denman, a 50-something artist wacked himself with a gun because his life sucked. I guess. Did I mention that he was in his 50s? Did I mention that I’m in my 50s? I’ve been dreading this decade my whole life.

Frankly I don’t know much more about him than I’ve just written. Odd, isn’t it, that my family would detail to me those salacious specifics and no more. He was my grandmother’s brother, or was he her uncle? I recall my father telling me it was her brother my father and I were named after, but that doesn’t make much sense now. She wasn’t likely to have a brother in his 50s before my father was born. At any rate she must have cared very deeply about old Fred Denman because she name my father after him, and he named me after himself.

Fred means peace. I like to say it’s the oldest hippy name. Peace. Pax. Paz. Pacem. Fred. In Sweden they still use the word Fred for the word peace, but they pronounce it different, like Freed. The word is very ancient and comes from the pre-Germanic Norse language, it’s an old European name not much in favor these days.

My father also was an artist, seems Grandma managed to implant that meme along with the name. That said, my father wasn’t a peaceful man. From the large scar across his forehead, also bequeathed to him by his mother —he was a disobedient child, and she rewarded him with a slap across the head with a fire-poker — his lack of peacefulness predated his battles with war and alcohol.

We had what is today called a dysfunctional family. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the modern term. Shell Shocked is the old term. We called it “Dad’s mad,’ or “Mom’s trying to drive dad crazy.” Usually alcohol was involved. Like an accelerant might be used to make a fire burn more vigorously, alcohol made my family more colorfully and dramatically explosive: children shoved through walls, fists smashed through walls, dishes shattered on foreheads (there seems to be a forehead slapping theme to all of this).

My father’s family wasn’t the only branch of the tree that liked to do battle with Demon Rum. Mom’s family, too, had a proud tradition of alcoholism. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I have gone a round or two in the ring with booze.

I didn’t name any of my children Fred. It seemed to me that we’d played the peaceful name out. Did I mention that both of my grandfathers at one time were professional boxers and soldiers? Maybe Fred was just meant for violence-balance, a bit of peace to butter the pugilism, a bit of the ying for yang. My first child I named Kendra: One who knows. The second is called Asa: The healer. My last child is named Colin: The cub or the future. I’ve made peace with my past.

©September 6, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

Happy Fourth of July

2010-07-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

watch George Carlin rap on the American Dream
What else are you going to do on the 4th?

THE DARK CONTINENT* NATURE, GENDER & LIES.

2010-05-24T21:49:00.000-07:00

My mother was a sexually repressed Catholic with effervescent sexuality bubbling off of her at all times and in everything she expressed. She informed my thoughts about women and she assured me men and women were as different as dogs and cats. She also made it very clear that outside of the marital bed, sex was a sin and terribly destructive for the woman. Sex without marriage condemned any woman to a life of prostitution or worse. Even if I hadn’t already been interested in women for purely hormonal reasons, my mother’s perspective on gender would have been enough to stimulate a lifetime of curiosity.

In The Female Thing, an examination of the state of women in the early 21st Century Laura Kipnis informs us: “Whether men and women are more sexually alike or sexually different remains the fundamental question. The answer? It depends on how you tell the story” (67). That being the case, why has our culture, utilizing legal statute and social constraint, beginning at birth, and at great cost to the individual, constructed a dishonest and asymmetrical view of human sexuality? Why does society work so diligently to separate the expectations and functions of our genders? Why is human sexuality so culturally, socially, and personally freighted as a topic of interest and exploration? Could it be that the distorted social-sexual construct that motivates these questions about gender and sexuality is driven by an attempt to control the reproductive process? Kipnis affirms this: “Women’s power inheres in our bodies, our child bearing capabilities, our female sensuality — all of which terrify men and society” (4). By subverting the power of female sexuality, under threat of violence, males attempt to wrest control away from women regarding the creation their progeny.

Male or female, the measure of a successful life is determined by the progeny we leave behind. In the “Natural Selection in Action” chapter of Essentials of Physical Anthropology, we are given a primal biological definition: “Fitness is simply differential reproductive success” (31). Similarly, in Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch, the founding text of Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology, God instructs the believer: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” Thus the measure of success, sacred, secular or scientific, is strictly biological: Have you left progeny capable of reproducing? Without progeny, our greatest accomplishments have no enduring value and are soon forgotten.

Who remembers Ogg-the-Neandertal’s life-altering discovery of how to control fire? Who still sings the epic songs of Nogg, the celebrated Homo heidelbergensian? Similarly, who, but our heirs, will recall most of us? The unique works we labored so arduously to accomplish within our own lifetimes will most likely vanish into landfills, dusty attics and second-hand shops, often while we’re still here on Earth. In the midst of this 21st Century Information Age few of us know much about our great grandparents’ lives. Nonetheless, they still live as long as their ‘blood’ courses through our blood, their genetic heritage fills our cells. They were ‘fit,’ and we tell their stories in our biology. If we are ‘fit,’ our offspring will tell our stories in their genes. Matt Ridley explains in the Red Queen, Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, “Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.” (174). Our progeny are our entry tickets into the next race, the race for the future.

Like Australopithecus before us, and like the cockroach that hides underneath our kitchen sink, we live to procreate. Everything we do is means to further those reproductive efforts. Whether we are crafting complex computer programs or carving out empires in the wilderness, we do this to increase our progeny, and our progeny’s chances of survival. When working in our own self-interest, the goal is simple and obvious no matter how emotionally complicated we make it: find a mate, make a child, do your best to see that it survives. We don’t typically think about it in this way, but even when we are working for someone, or something else, we’re still engaged in furthering procreative efforts, simply not our own. Whether the ‘other’ we are working for is local, national or industrial entity, whether we do so voluntarily or are conscripted, we are furthering their power and authority and thus their procreative efforts. Ridley reminds us, “The connection between sex and power is a long one” (174). Throughout most of history, “[if] a man could grow ten times as rich as his neighbor … he could acquire more wives” (194).

Today we substitute mistresses and serial monogamy for wives, but the game remains the same. The mistress who becomes the wife is usually quick to provide her new mate with offspring. She’s more than a little familiar with the shackles of progeny, and she typically wastes little time in staking her genetic claim to the man she’s wooed away from another woman. That said, her goal is the same as the last wife’s goal: Have children, and do her best to see that her genetic contribution survives to have children of its own. If you’re a man, the math is simple, the more wives you have the more progeny you have; the more women you impregnate, the more progeny you leave for destiny. For women, the situation is both similar and more complex; her procreative efforts are restricted by the number of children she, herself, can bear. The more safety, comfort, and nourishment her mate provides, the more likely her offspring will thrive to procreate in turn.

After the baby is conceived, the man’s work it done. Or is it? Culturalists, especially male culturalists, like to promulgate the idea that motherhood is a special task only females are genetically and instinctively equipped to handle. ‘Men hunt. Women take care of babies. That’s nature’s way.’ The evidence does not support this conclusion. Gestation and lactation are restrictive female capabilities, but that is not to say the role we call ‘mothering’ is a strictly for the girls. Men are more than adequately equipped to provide all the nurturing a baby or child requires, sans breastfeeding. Ironically, in modern American culture, the average new mother breastfeeds for less than six months, and a substantial number never breastfeed at all.

Once the baby exits the vagina, in many cases men could provide exactly everything women provide. “What we now like to call an instinct is a culturally specific development … there’s no reason it can’t be invented differently — or invented in men as well — when social priorities dictate” (73) Kipnis tells us. When we object and claim that these roles are fixed in biological amber, she corrects this common misconception: “Over the course of history, cultures have endlessly vacillated when it comes to describing the differences between the sexes… a male characteristic in one society is a female characteristic in another,” (3). Kipnis continues “it’s no use trying to derive the solution from the body, since the body is forever being creatively reimagined in ways that ratify existing social premises about gender, including premises about whether men and women are more alike or different” (67). We each have our fixed roles in procreation but the so-called nurturing mother’s role is a learned and socially dictated response. In concept Ridley agrees: “In humans, everything about behavior is learned, and nothing inherited.” (174).

That said, a woman who is regularly nursing (for up to four years in a traditional culture) and constantly tending to a small and relatively helpless human being is less likely to ovulate, less likely to copulate on a regular basis, and less likely to start the next cycle of procreation. Her mate, on the other hand, has been capable and ready to sire his next offspring the entire time she’s been gravid, and will continue to be capable of creating new progeny for the entire five-year period (including gestation) she’s been ‘mothering.’

To achieve the goal of fruitfully multiplying, women and men have similar approaches, although slightly different equipment. In The Nature of Sex: Architecture & Design of Man & Woman we are informed that women are endowed with as few as 450 viable eggs to devote to reproduction over the course of their limited reproductive life cycle, whereas men produce millions of sperm every hour. Ideally “men can father a child just about every time they copulate with a different woman, whereas women can bear the child of only one man at a time” (179), Ridley claims.

I would suggest this is an irrelevant comparison. Neither men nor women alone are capable (at this moment in the early 21st Century) of turning their solitary gametes into human offspring. No woman has yet converted more than a small fraction of her 450 eggs into babies (Octomom, notwithstanding). No man in recent history has managed to impregnate millions, or even hundreds of women. The former basketball star Wilt Chamberlin claims to have consensually bedded 20,000 women — perhaps it’s telling that he did not impregnate any of them.

On the other hand Ridley informs us, “the sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many ‘houses of virgins’ throughout his kingdom …. Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity” (173). Remember Atahualpa next time you’re trudging off to ‘work’ for ‘the man.’ One might think that providing a stud service for that many women would wear a fellow out, that there be a lot of ‘down’ time. Not so says Helen Fisher, PhD, Biological Anthropologist, Research Professor and member of the Center for Human Evolution Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University. In The Nature of Sex: Science of the Sexes Fisher tells us “men and women are in a permanent state of arousal, it’s the brain that acts as a break.” Apparently the brain break is ineffective. “Human beings of both sexes are interested in sex at all times of the menstrual cycle,” Ridley states, “compared with many animals, we are astonishingly hooked on copulation.”

We learn in The Female Thing that the alleged difference between the genders regarding ‘sexual appetite’ is a recent invention. Previous to the late 18th Century (i.e., the Victorian Era) men and women were presumed to have equivalent voracious sexual appetites and responses, hence the bawdy dames of the Georgian Era and earlier. As the Victorian Era began, with its widely discussed ‘Victorian morality,’ so did questions about female sexual desire (68). This change in expectation arose in response to the recognition of our different anatomies. Previously it was assumed that women, and especially their genitals, were simply inverted forms of the more visible male genitalia, thus women must be like men in these regards. When this was discovered not to be strictly true, social expectations changed as well. If women aren’t the mirrors of men, they must be the opposite. If men sought and desired sex, a good woman must find it abhorrent and avoid it at all costs, hence the well-trodden phrase: “Just lie back and think of England.” While the origins of this phrase are unclear, Wikipedia, and other sources tell us this “was an instruction given to brides and women in general in the Victorian Era regarding how to cope with the sexual demands of their husbands. While childbearing was considered a patriotic duty, women were not supposed to enjoy sexual intercourse.” The origin of the phrase is less important than the cultural expectation it represents. Kipnis explains that this is an on-going phenomena, “New cultural narratives about women and their place in the world invariably get mapped back onto the female body and female genitals” (69). Culture is powerful enough to create shame and guilt, but biology always trumps social expectations. Humans are obsessively sexual animals.

Historically men have tended to operate in the external world while women have operated in the familial world of hearth and home. While the men are away, it’s hard to know where the women play. Whether men are hunter-gathers — well-muscled, half-naked fellows wandering the bush looking for wild beasts to kill and bring home for feasting (and occasionally stumbling onto a tasty bit of ‘strange’ to ravish), or Mad Men of the 1950s — well-dressed guys in expensive suits cutting killer deals to put dinner on the table (and occasionally playing hide the salami with their secretaries and clients), men worry about what their lonely wives are up to back at home. Mostly men wonder if their wives are ‘fiddling about’ with other men. Could these concerns about female infidelity, concerns about the parentage of their progeny, motivate the construction of a social order that denies women’s sexuality? Is this just ‘typical male paranoia’ or do men actually have something to worry about?

In “Inside Out: A DNA Diary” published in Discover Magazine, Boonsri Dickinson tells us of the boilerplate warnings disclosed to every participant who seeks DNA analysis: “You may learn information about yourself that you may not anticipate … you may discover your father is not genetically your father” (37). Suddenly, “Who’s Your Daddy?” is more than a song, television show, movie, or sexually suggestive, comedic punch line (although the phrase has been use as all these and much, much more). Paul Farhi tell us in the Washington Post that the question dates to at least 1681.

Robin Baker and Mark Bellis of Liverpool University inform us that it’s more than a rhetorical question: “Roughly one in three of the babies born in Western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair” (The Red Queen, 226). This percentage is based on studies they did in the late 1980s and the percentage held steady in additional studies done in the US and Canada. Such rates of female infidelity are independent and irrespective of education or economic status. Other studies have shown ‘false-paternity’ rates ranging between ten percent and thirty percent. In fact such female adultery is a bane of the medical genealogy field, where it makes all long-term findings suspect.

“Adultery is common wherever it has been looked for,” (229) agrees Ridley. Interestingly enough “roughly one in three” offspring not being fathered by the nominal father seems to be a constant figure across species lines as well. ‘Birds do it, bees do it, even so-called monogamous non-human primates do it. Let’s do it. Let’s fool around with someone other than dad’ could be the theme song of sex.

Some social scientists have suggested the remarkably high percentages of false-paternity progeny could be responsive to the limited availability of ‘quality’ mating choices. Ridley tells us “married females chose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance, and married” (211). Presumably ‘married’ is an incidental quality rather than a selected attribute. When the female ends up mated to a handsome male, Ridley informs us, she gets his genes but not much lot more: “He works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young. … This increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him with the stud next door” (224).

Thus the archetype of the typical morally superior, chaste female is very much an incomplete picture. “It is foolish even to talk of humans having a mating system at all. They do what they want, adapting their behavior to the prevailing opportunity” (177), Ridley states. Kipnis concurs, “femininity was never about being some kind of delicate flower; it was tactical: a way of securing resources and positioning women as advantageously as possible” (5).

From a purely biological perspective, Ridley proposes “cuckoldry is an asymmetrical fate. A woman loses no genetic investment if her husband is unfaithful, but a man risks unwittingly raising a bastard” (237). Perhaps the genetic reality of infidelity is exactly the reverse of the perceived social construct of human sexuality. At the very least, a substantial number of women are predatory philanders while their mates, inadvertently, are dutiful dads. Clearly the issue is more complex than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Making matters more interesting, biology has tipped the deck solidly in women’s favor by creating the orgasm. Is it really all that surprising that so many women complain about not having orgasms with their partners when nature has contrived to directly link female orgasms to conception? Kipnis tells us “92% of British women admit to faking an orgasm at least once in their lives” and “75% of women don’t orgasm through penetration” (both 40). Similarly Shere Hite in Women and Love found proportional percentages in her studies of American women: “research extending from 1971 to 1976, and including 3,500 women, found that two-thirds of women do not orgasm through intercourse,” (215), or at least they do not have orgasms through intercourse with their routine partners.

This is a huge problem for conception as Baker and Bellis discovered “the amount of sperm that is retained in a woman’s vagina after sex varies according to whether she had an orgasm … in faithful women about 55 percent of the orgasms were of the high-retention (that is most fertile) type. In unfaithful women, only 40 percent of the copulations with her partner were of this type, but 70 percent of their copulations with her lover were of this fertile type. Moreover, whether deliberate or not, the unfaithful women were having sex with their lovers at times of the month when they were most fertile” (225). The net result of this is that an unfaithful women is much more likely to conceive a child with her lover than her husband.

Human females not having a visible estrus period of obvious fertility gives them an additional leg up, vis-à-vis adultery Ridley informs us, quoting research by L. Benshoof and Randy Thornhill which suggests “concealed ovulation allows a woman to mate with a superior man by stealth without deserting or alerting her husband … she is more likely to know [on an unconscious level] when to have sex with her lover, whereas her husband does not know when she is fertile. … Silent ovulation is a weapon in the adultery game” (232).

Indeed, if it seems as that the typical male-female relationship is more adversarial than cooperative that’s not unexpected. Despite romantic love, on a purely biological level each partner is more motivated to work at enhancing their own genetic contributions over their partner‘s genetic contributions.

In an interview published in the San Francisco Examiner, Candace Bushnell, author of Sex in the City and other novels on modern sexual relations agrees. “It makes more sense for a woman to have children with five different sex partners instead of five children with the same man. It’s exactly the same argument [men have], but tell it to a man, oooooooooh … that’s the secret nature of women and that’s what’s wonderful but you can’t say that.”

To answer Kipnis original question, it appears that sexually men and women are profoundly similar rather than different. In fact it appears that sexually men and women have very similar strategies for perpetuation of their individual lineages and similar motivations and expectations.

Men, through society, attempt to moderate female sexuality (i.e., infidelity) by social censure and the creation of false ideals, but these efforts have limited success despite the horrendous psychological and social burden they place on women.

The marriage bed remains the foundation of shared reproductive efforts but not the limit. Both genders use adultery to enhance the success of their individual reproductive strategies. Men seek quantity, hoping to impregnate as many women as possible and leave a diverse genetic sample in the world. Women seek quality, hoping to improve their own genetic contribution.

We keep our sexuality and our sexual practices private because knowing the actual facts of procreation (especially who’s zooming who) is not necessarily mutually beneficial and the risks of disclosure too high. Distorting the social-sexual construct to assert a more passive, de-sexualize role for women allows women to work in the silence to achieve their own goals and agendas, while similarly allowing men the opportunity to pursue covert sexual liaisons outside the marriage bed without further destabilizing the marital relationship.

As long as there is economic disparity between the genders, marriage allows a women and her offspring limited financial security. Even when men and women achieve economic parity, marriage is likely to remain the standard as raising children is expensive, labor intensive and emotionally and physically taxing. But I would suggest that the explicit current contract of marriage — between one man and one woman, for life — is not a stable platform on which we will build coming generations, but that marriage — the coming together of different people for affection, comfort, sharing, and procreation is an enduring institution.

* In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud wrote: “We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology” (p. 212).

©May 24, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

WORKS CITED.
Dickinson, Boonsri. “Inside Out: A DNA Diary” Discover Magazine, Sept., 2008, (34-39). Print
Dodsworth, Fred. “Q&A.: Candace Bushnell, author of Sex in the City.” San Francisco Examiner.
July 20, 2001. (A01) Print.
enotes. “Dark Continent: Freud” April 23. 2010. Web.

Farhi, Paul. “Conception of a Question: Who’s Your Daddy?” The Washington Post. January 4, 2005 (C01).
Hite, Shere. Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress. New York: A Borzoi Book, 1987. Print.
Jurmain, Robert, Lynn Kilgore and Wenda Trevathan. Essentials of Physical Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Centage Learning, 2006. Print.
Kipnis, Laura. The Female Thing. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Print.
Nature of Sex, Discovery Channel. Five part DVD series, 2008.
… Science of the Sexes, Discovery Channel. 2 DVDs, 2008.
… Anatomy of Sex, Discovery Channel. DVD, 2008.
… Architecture & Design of Man & Woman, Discovery Channel, DVD, 2008.
Biblos. “Genesis.” April 23, 2010. Web.
Ridley, Matt. Red Queen: Sex & the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1993. Print.
Wikipedia. “Just Lie Back and Think of England.” April 23, 2010. Web.

ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and The Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper Colophon Books. 1976. Print.
Dowling, Siobhán. Spiegel-Online-International . Oct. 22, 2008, April 23, 2010. Web.
Fortune, Marie Marshall. Sexual Violence, the Unmentionable Sin: An Ethical and Pastoral Perspective. New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1983. Print.
Heyn, Dalma. Erotic Silence of the American Wife. New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1992. Print.
Jen, Gish. Typical American. New York: Plume, 1992. Print.
Luchetti, Cathy. Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Luchetti, Cathy & Carol Olwell. Women of the West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982. Print.
McKelvey, Tara. One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press. 2007. Print
Nature of Sex, Discovery Channel. Five part DVD series, 2008.
… The Journey of Life, Discovery Channel, 2008. DVD, 2008.
… Conception to Birth, Discovery Channel. 2008. DVD, 2008.
Newitz, Annalee. “Is Sex Natural?” Bay Guardian Sept 23, 2003. April 23, 2010. Web
Science Daily “Quantity May Determine Quality When Choosing Romantic Partners.”
April 15, 2010. April 23, 2010. Web
Tannen, Deborah. Gender & Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print.
Wolfe, Tom. Hooking Up. New York: Picador, 2000. Print.

Is your pussy making you crazy?

2010-05-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

Toxoplasmosis — The Bug Rewiring our Brains.

My son’s twenty-something friend is a diagnosed schizophrenic. That’s not to say he is bad or mean or even much of a problem to be around most of the time, but then again, I don’t expect much from him … or most folks in their twenties. A handsome and sweet guy, he is not my first contact with mental illness on life’s meander. I’ve twice had friends commit suicide, and two more played very active roles in their own demises, but my most intimate experience with profound madness was yet closer. When I was but nineteen, my dear and wildly sexy girlfriend had a series of psychotic episodes that resulted in her being involuntarily institutionalized for most of a year, initially at Stanford University Medical Center Hospital, then for a week or so at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, and finally for many months at El Camino Hospital. I didn’t see her mental implosion coming and it was a very devastating experience. We remained together and very close during those difficult times, but she broke up with me shortly after being released from the hospital. I suspect all these experiences have played a role in my on-going interest in the nature of what we call consensual reality, and how easy it is for any of us to wander too far from life’s safe, well-worn mental path, so when on several occasions in the last few years I stumbled across articles linking schizophrenia and toxoplasmosis, my interest was piqued. Before we look at the linkage, let’s look at the lifecycle of the protozoan parasite called Toxoplasma gondii.

Inside an infected host, the protozoan intracellular parasite Toxoplasma forms cysts five to 50 micrometers in diameter, which are found throughout the host animal, but appear to congregate especially in the amygdala and other brain tissues, as well as in major skeletal muscle tissue, cardio-muscular tissue and the eyes! Wikipedia tells us that Toxoplasma exists in two states, a sexual phase and an asexual phase (tachyzoite). Its sexual reproductive activities only occur when the parasite is inside its primary host, members of the cat family (Felidae), while its asexual phase can occur in any warm-blooded animal or bird. Cats typically get infected after eating a rodent or bird that has been colonized by the parasite in its tachyzoitic phase. Once inside the cat the parasite enters its sexual phase, which culminates in ‘spores,’ called oocysts, which get disseminated via the cat’s feces. These oocysts can exist outside host, for example in the soil, for as long as a year. It is by ingesting these mature oocysts that birds, rodents, and other warm-blooded animals including humans, get infected with Toxoplasma.

The most interesting aspect of this parasite’s behavior is the manner in which it overrides the bird or rodent’s fear of its natural predator, cats, to ensure its own propagation. According to Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biological sciences and neurology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, “…certain parasites control the brain of their host. They hijack our cells, our energy and our lifestyles so they can thrive. Toxo seems to know how to destroy fear and anxiety circuits … a brain region called the amygdala … and toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. It takes over sexual arousal circuitry” (Scientific American. “Bugs in the Brain”)

In mice this makes the mouse become sexually aroused by the scent of cat urine. This is the opposite of a successful mating strategy if you’re a mouse, but it’s a very, very successful reproductive strategy for the parasite as it puts the mouse inside the cat quickly. The big question is how does toxoplasmosis affect its other hosts, specifically, but not exclusively humans? This is a particularly important question, as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 20% of the US population is positive for toxoplasmosis — that’s more than 60,000,000 Americans (CDC “Toxoplasma gondii Infection in the United States, 1999–2000”). Globally the estimated infection rate per country seems to vary from 35% to more than 80%.

Unfortunately, as an intracellular protozoa (i.e. an organism that inserts itself inside the host’s cells) it is very, very difficult, if not impossible to rid any infected animal of the parasite, and it is also difficult to detect, locate, or isolate Toxoplasma during its latency phase. The good news is that for most humans with healthy immune systems, Toxoplasma appears to be relatively benign.

“Infections rarely cause symptoms, but the parasite remains in the body and can reactivate after lying dormant for years,” according to ScienceDaily (“Toxoplasma Infection Increases Risk of Schizophrenia, Study Suggests”), but more recent research suggests Toxoplasma may play a worrisome role in a host of illnesses, including schizophrenia.

“Toxoplasmosis changes some of the chemical messages in the brain,” says Dr Glenn McConkey of University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences. “The parasite infects the brain by forming a cyst within its cells and produces an enzyme called tyrosine hydroxylase, which is needed to make dopamine. Dopamine’s role in mood, sociability, attention, motivation and sleep patterns are well documented … in addition, the ability of the parasite to make dopamine implies a potential link with (schizophrenia and) other neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, Tourette’s syndrome and attention deficit disorders” (ScienceDaily “Toxoplasmosis Parasite May Trigger Schizophrenia And Bipolar Disorders”).

Robert Yolken, M.D., a neurovirologist at Hopkins Children’s agrees, telling us “findings reveal the strongest association we’ve seen yet between infection with this very common parasite (toxoplasma) and the subsequent development of schizophrenia” (ScienceDaily “Toxoplasma Infection Increases Risk Of Schizophrenia, Study Suggests”).

Unfortunately, schizophrenia appears not to be curable, per se, at this time. Use of anti-Toxoplasma drugs in conjunction with anti-psychotic drugs have shown some success in ameliorating the disease’s impacts, but schizophrenics, typically suffering from extreme paranoia, are notoriously drug adverse. The disease appears to be lifelong and tremendously expensive with estimates in the US of 300,000 plus victims and costs in the range of $40 billion (Stanley Medical Research Institute. “Toxoplasmosis-Schizophrenia Research”). More promising is a cat vaccine for Toxoplasma (The Medical News “Evidence is mounting to link toxoplasmosis with schizophrenia”).

Also of interest are the proposed cultural impacts of the long association of humans with cats and Toxoplasma. Women with toxoplasmosis show more sexually promiscuous behavior (Wikipedia “Toxoplasmosis”) and men appear to engage more frequently in high risk behavior that can result in violent death (The Edge “A conversation with Robert Sapolsky”).

“Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women,” Dr. Nicky Boulter, an infectious disease researcher at Sydney University of Technology told Australasian Science magazine . “On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.”

I would suggest that these behaviors have high selection value for our species. Females who have sex with multiple partners build additional support alliances for both themselves and their progeny (see Essentials of Physical Anthropology. “Chapter 7”). Men who take high risks typically also tend to have high success rates in reproducing and in acquiring ‘wealth and nourishment’ — better providing for their mates, progeny and community. In the event of the male’s likely death, his offspring are more likely to survive due to his mate’s extra-alliances and the questionable paternity of his offspring. Additionally, culture-wide behaviors may be attributable to Toxoplasma’s ability to alter individual behaviors. In 2006, Kevin Lafferty, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made such a claim in his paper, “Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence culture?” published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

“The geographic variation in the latent prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules” we’re told in “Cat Parasite May Affect Cultural Traits In Human Populations” published by ScienceDaily.

“Lafferty’s analysis found that countries with high Toxoplasma prevalence had a higher aggregate neuroticism score, and western nations with high prevalence also scored higher in the ‘neurotic’ cultural dimensions of ‘masculine’ sex roles and uncertainty avoidance” claims Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution and Science “The Effect of Toxoplasma gondii on Human Culture”.

Could it be that America’s longstanding love affair with military adventurism is a direct result of our pussy loving ways? A doctoral dissertation on that topic could be in my future.

So the question that comes immediately to my mind is “Why cats?” Why not just exterminate them, or at least banish them from human habitations? Sure, they’re fluffy and they purr and folks tend to like stroking them; but I’m allergic to their dander, loath the smell of their excrement (probably my rodent roots), dislike their the fish breath, and frankly I am not fond of their tendency to stick their butts in my face. Gross. But I’m not the key decision-maker in this man-cat relationship. The females of the house get ultimate authority over pets, and there’s the answer: mice. In one of those wonderful synergistic epiphanies I recently recalled also reading science articles linking mice, specifically Mus domesticus, to human breast cancer! Breast cancer is the second leading cause of death of women in the US and the world. According to the American Cancer Society, about 1.3 million women will be diagnosed with breast cancer annually worldwide and about 465,000 will die from the disease. Personally, in the 1970s, I knew five different women who contracted breast cancer in their late-20s to mid-30s, including one very bright woman who succumbed to the disease. Since then I’ve come to know even more women who have suffered from breast cancer. Could the stereotypical fear women allegedly have against rodents be unconsciously based on a real threat?

The idea that some forms of breast cancer could be virally induced is not new. In the 1930s a biologist named John Bittner suggested exactly such a link. The retrovirus known as Mouse Mammal Tumor Virus (MMTV) now has been identified as the culprit, and it is transmissible to humans (Jones, Dan. “Blame the Mouse” New Scientist). What a better way to keep the mouse population down than cats? So thus we have the complete cat-and-rat rationale for modern civilization. The cats keep the girls easy, the boys hyper-active, and breast cancer at bay. That’s what I call intelligent design.

Cross-talking the Opposite Sex.

2010-05-13T17:32:00.000-07:00

This is in response to Deborah Tannen's essay: "Sex, Lies, and Conversation."

Boys and girls are different Deborah Tannen tells us in “Sex, Lies, and Conversation.” Boys have the boy-communication thing going and girls have nothing like it (that whole ‘what they don’t have-thing’), so no wonder boys and girls are unfit company for each other, except for the whole sex thing, which is way over rated! Or let’s share a story about how boys are all Attention Deficit Disordered and incapable of intimacy while girls are so focused on their feelings they can spend hours talking about how hurt they are (Depressed). Or maybe it’s just that sports, video games, and the evening news is more important than hearing what some woman has to say after you’ve been working all day, presuming you (the older male reader) still have a job. My wife is a woman. I say this because I want to make it clear she’s female. It seems that bearing two children sired by me (or so we are to believe, but you know, as a male, you never really know unless you do the DNA test and who’s ready for that dash of icy cold water?) may not be hearsay evidence enough, so let me state it clearly and firmly and insistently — but not argumentatively, because even though I’m a man, I don’t want to obstruct our clear communication processes. (Did that hurt your feelings? I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings but I must warn you in advance, humans often hurt each other during the act of trans-sexual communications.) Any rate, what I’m trying to say — by the by, my wife shared a very interesting story with me this morning: Breast milk is Best!: “Use your titty and your kids go to the head of the class; use infant formula and it’s a life on the short bus!” Something about manganese? See it seems manganese is found in much lower concentrations in breast milk than in soy-based, or cow-milk-based infant ‘milk’ products. Excess manganese has been indicated in learning disability issues! Too much huh? I wonder if too much manganese increases muscle mass? Maybe there’s an inverse correlation between muscle mass and intellect that’s actually manganese-based. Could lead to (will you stop looking directly at me, it creeps me out! You wanna fight, Goddam it?!) a whole new field of study! We could breed (or at least nurture/develop) the ideal sports franchise, big muscley kids with learning disabilities. Get them right after they pop out and start force-feeding them Enfamil! Kinda like the pâté de foie gras we had when we were in France. Jesus Christ. Literally, they fed us pâté de foie gras several times a day! I began to feel like a goose, myself. Anyway, I was talking about my wife and how she doesn’t talk to me. See, it seems she says I’m too confrontational. She told me years ago she just gave up. I just wasn’t going to be the person she was going to talk to. Anyway, she tells me she just wants me to listen. She doesn’t want me to solve her problems. Hell, that’s nice, but I’m a problem solver. Give me a problem, any problem, and I’ll do my damnedest to fix what ails ya. I can fix your sink, your stove, your toilet, your sewer. I’m the poop specialist and I can build your house. I built mine! (Rebuilt it, anyway, but that’s another story.) Like I said, I’ve been out of work for two years now, (I told you that didn’t I?) not that I don’t work, Hell, I work non-stop, dusk to dawn, an (unemployed) man’s work is never done — and then she wants me to take all the initiative in bed! That’s asking a lot, don’t you think? I clean (sometimes). I cook (sometimes). I watch the kids (granddaughter, anyway). I get tired. At the end of the day, I just want to sleep! Is that asking too much?! …and there’s that whole ‘pleasing her’ bit, with her multiple orgasms and oral stimulation and 45 minutes of foreplay — that’s a lot of work and by the time I’ve spent all that energy and effort what I get? BUPKIS! A little squirt, if I’m lucky. It’s not fair, women get it all, and men get nada! Sometimes I think God is just another femme-Nazi man-hater! It’s not like it used to be, you know, where I got paid for the work I do!? So now my wife brings home the ‘bacon,’ and I read in the newspaper yesterday that that’s the new meme. Women work, men loaf. Up 77 percent they say! …anyway, the wife, she busts her hump all day, yammering away at up to 60 subordinates, five clinics, 22,000 clients, and way too many supervisors, vendors, what-have-you, and when she gets home I ask her: “How was your day, honey?” And she fuckin’ grunts at me and turns on the boob tube! It’s not fair! She just won’t communicate with me anymore and I feel horrible. I’m thinking about divorce! I guess men and women are plain different that way. Women just can’t express their feelings.

©May 10, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

If you missed my note on top, for context, here's Deborah Tannen's original essay: "Sex, Lies, and Conversation." or https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/sexlies.htm

Lit Crit: Typical American by Gish Jen

2010-05-12T07:35:00.000-07:00

“The Husband Would Command, The Wife Obey”

Ostensibly Jen Gish’s Typical American is a typical immigrant’s tale: Shortly after World War II, Yifeng Chang journeys around the world from China to America, the land of golden opportunity, to become Ralph Chang and uncover his true destiny — but no one’s life is so simple, including Ralph’s. He leaves his natal lands behind but brings Yifeng’s traditional values and gender illusions with him to this adopted American home. It is not the cross-cultural traveler’s travails that wreck Ralph’s life so much as his obdurate, oppressive sexist nature toward the very women who love, nurture and repeatedly save him. In the face of their persistent largess Ralph methodically elects to destroy everything he has rather than embrace a life that might include sexual equality in this allegedly egalitarian new homeland.
Ralph Chang’s eventual moral, familial, and financial collapse, and the physical injuries he inflicts his wife and the more the even serious injuries he subsequently inflicts on Theresa, his accomplished ‘Older Sister,’ reflects the female author’s depiction of a male world that is pathological, irrational, violent, and sexist. In the scenes Ms. Jen creates, men are important and empowered, irrespective of their flaws, and women are not, irrespective of their attributes. Women must subordinate their goals and lives to appease their men, which inevitably results in terrible destructive and avoidable ‘life lessons.’ More so than her characters’ status as naïve strangers in a strange land, there is an underlying, pregnant male violence that infuses Jen’s narrative.

Early in this novel we are warned women are temptresses — treacherous, duplicitous, overtly sexual creatures whose sole purpose is to destroy men’s lives. For example, the author has Yifeng, ‘Intent on the Peak,’ tell us almost immediately: “Girls, he knew, were what happened to even the cleverest, most diligent, most upright of scholars; the scholars kissed, got syphilis, and died without getting their degrees.” (Jen. 7). While this is not an atypical pre-adolescent perspective on male-female relations, we are told Yifeng is “more or less grown up” (4), and this tone and these warnings are repeated throughout the novel.
Consider yet another example, the first female non-familial character described by the older, Americanized Ralph, speaking in retrospect: “‘She was some — what you call? — tart,’ he said” (8). On the surface he is simply regaling his young daughters with tales of the life he experienced upon first reaching the storied shores of the New World, but the covert and clear message he attempts to inculcate upon his impressionable young daughters is one of caution: ‘If you’re not very careful, you, too, could be judged as both wanton and wanting by any insignificant man you might meet!’ Lest we take this passage too lightly, examine the definition of ‘tart’ from TheFreedictionary.com: “a prostitute, or a woman considered to be sexually promiscuous.” Note that even in our current culture, linguistically, this usage informs us that a prostitute and a ‘sexually promiscuous’ woman are one and the same! This judgment, identifying ‘Cammy’ as a ‘tart,’ comes from a man who was at the time powerless and insignificant — a ‘foreign’ student who lacked housing, income, status, and even basic communication skills; yet he was a man, thus entitled to make such a sweeping thoughtless and casual denunciation.
Within weeks of meeting Cammy, the college’s Foreign Student Affairs secretary and a co-participant in the most modest and seemly of flirtations, Ralph elevates her from mere tart to mythological man-eater/destroyer, referring to her as “Yang Guifei incarnate —a Tang Dynasty courtesan for whom an emperor went to ruin” (Jen. 16).
But translating his Asian sexual archetypes to America required a conscious confirmation process, Ralph found his necessary emotional translator one day in a random unnamed older man at a luncheonette who instilled him with the perceived wisdom of the New World; everything wrong could be blamed on ‘Dames.’ This fellow informs us “what was wrong with politics (dames); what was wrong with the Yankees (dames); and what was wrong with America”(17). Ralph reveres these ‘truths’ and uses this power to condemn his accomplished older sister when he discovers she is having an affair with ‘Uncle Henry’ Chao, a married family friend.
Ralph repeatedly humiliates his sister in public, including in front of her young nieces for this failing, while ignoring the numerous faults of males, including his own. At one point, during a family dinner Ralph tells his daughters that their aunt is a ‘Rotten Egg.’ His sister explains: “‘Chinese expression,’ said Theresa evenly. ‘Meaning a woman of no virtue.” It is not ‘Uncle’ Henry who has violated the social trust, but their aunt who is held accountable. Theresa is even held up for public ridicule when Ralph’s immoral friend Grover Ding ‘mashes’ Theresa, forcing a kiss upon her. ‘Uncle’ Grover gets a pass for his egregious behavior while Theresa becomes scornable. At this point in the story Ralph doesn’t know that his own wife has been an enthralled recipient of ‘Uncle’ Glover’s sexual overtures as well. Even after Ralph discovers evidence of his wife’s affair, Grover is not held accountable for this sexual indiscretion, only Ralph’s wife. Thus we are repeatedly instructed that the distaff half of our nation’s population is the source of our sexual failings, and of all else that ails us.

When we contrast this carefully crafted image of woman as a destructive, sexually rapacious predator with the actual descriptive behaviors of the primary female characters, the reader gets the opportunity to see more clearly the heroic (or should I was heroinic?) diligence and effort each woman exerts to improve her life against nearly insurmountable obstacles. A subtle example of the exemplary role played by these women is contained in Ralph’s never-named father’s instructions early in the tale: “Yifeng will please study his Older Sister. He will please observe everything she does, and simply copy her” (4).
If Ralph had done so Jen’s Typical American might have been more like Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and less a debacle. Instead Ralph reduces his ‘Older Sister’ to Bai Xiao, ‘Know-It-All,’ and bumbles from one self-destructive impulse to the next.
Theresa is more than an idealized role-model, at five foot seven inches she is a large woman, taller than Yifeng, a notable athlete, independent and forthright, yet willing, even eager to sacrifice her life to better the lives of her family and friends.
When Theresa’s younger sister Meimei (which translates as Girlgirl) wishes to marry, Theresa allows herself to be sent to care for an invalid girl in Shanghai rather than embarrass her family with her unwedded-elder-sister-status. This auspicious, self-sacrificing decision introduces Hailan (Helen), Ralph’s future wife, and brings the family, Theresa, Helen and Ralph, together again in America after Theresa rescues Ralph from the desperate circumstances that led him to consider crime and suicide. Penniless, hungry, homeless, and destitute of spirit, Ralph allows Theresa (despite an injured ankle, the result of Ralph’s over enthusiastic welcoming embrace) to nurture him back to physical and emotional health.
Under Theresa and Helen’s tutelage Ralph recovers his self-esteem, gains employment, reenters college, and passively finds ‘love and marriage’ with Helen.
When he begins to flounder again in college and spends all his time in a depressed state, sleeping, Theresa tells him “my scholarship has been cancelled” (80), a lie so that he might not feel so worthless by comparison. The lie works and Helen reports “he’s studying again” (83).
Lan Dong tell us in “Gendered Home and Space for the Diaspora: Gish Jens Typical American” that Theresa’s efforts to both pursue “her career as a doctor and in the meantime attempt to save her brother’s face” is an artifact of her Chinese culture, but the reality of feminine sacrifice is also an artifact of American culture, and perhaps a direct result of hundreds if not thousands of year of nearly global patriarchal domination.
When the heat in their apartment building ceases, it is invalid Helen, not manly Ralph, who descends into the basement and remedies the situation (Jen. 81).
When the new apartment they rent is too small without enough bedrooms for all, Theresa willingly converts a dining area into her semi-private bedroom.
When the family buys a new home, it is Theresa’s income as a doctor that makes it possible.
Again Dong informs us because they are Chinese, “Helen and Theresa continue to compromise in order to ease Ralph’s angst and to confirm for him his patriarchal domination at home and his professional progress in American society,” but these feminine accommodations are also an intrinsic aspect of American culture.
When Ralph’s impetuous decision to resign his secure and reliable job as a professor to open a chicken restaurant reduces their income precipitously, Helen steps up and takes over running the cash register.
When Ralph’s chicken restaurant business collapses, rather than blaming him for the failure, Helen draws herself closer to him.
The author tells us: “If being married was a matter of becoming one, they had finally achieved what in better times they could not (Jen. 249).
When the inevitable reconciliation occurs, it is Theresa’s salary that allows them to make those initial moves toward emotional and financial recovery.

Each step of the way Ralph is carefully chaperoned to his betterment by the women in his life, but as soon as he is on his feet he inevitably begins to chafe at sharing determinative authority. He goads himself with self-deprecatory thoughts: “At home, the husband would command, the wife obey” (69) and gives himself permission to behave badly, “for he was the father, and could do whatever he liked” (113). He does not need nor desire their opinions or involvement in the decision-making process. He will make all the family decisions and they will abide, he decides, but then he struggles with his inner fears, “he felt himself to be, not the head of the family, a scholar, but a child on a high wooden stool, helpless”(72).
“All his life, he’d known he would get married, and yet he’d never stopped to consider what it would be like” (69). His wife and sister are not responsible for his feelings of inadequacy, but Helen tells us “who could take it easy with Ralph home? … Everything he took badly” (77). Inevitably his feelings become intolerable and Ralph proceeds, as is his habit, destructively rather than collaboratively.
The first sign of this coming dénouement appears, as it often does, in the marriage bed or more precisely under their shared marital mattress. Ralph discovers American popular culture women’s magazines Helen has hidden there: “What else might she be keeping from him” (68) he wonders, what were “among the other secrets of her drawers” (72).
The author here subtly infers that what she might be hiding is linked to her gender and genitalia, foreshadowing the infidelities to come.
Distrust begins to poison the husband-and-wife relationship. Soon it is Helen’s very breath that Ralph insists he must control with ‘manly tyranny’(71): “You should breathe this way” (71), he tells Helen and deliberately shows her how he wants her to inhale and exhale. No long thereafter, although she was the acknowledged and beloved family cook, her cooking needed his instructions as well, and his wife begins to fear him: “As he stood in the doorway, homing to her presence, he thought he saw her shoulders rise with apprehension, her elbows draw in. ‘No more, no more,’ she said without turning around” (72). Ralph’s emotional bullying turns, as if often does in life, to battering “Ralph knocked at Helen’s skull … Knocking made Ralph feel fierce, but it made Helen go blank — which made him knock more… until she ran into another room.” (73). This foreshadows the extreme violence to come.
As Jen’s story winds toward its end, Ralph’s business is in ruins and his sister has abandoned him to live apart. Ralph acquires a powerful pit bull dog, which he fears but carefully trains to be even more threatening, allegedly for his daughters, “but the girls are terrified of the dog” (252).
The threat of imminent violence grows as Ralph, now out of work and facing increasing bills related to his failed business, trains and abuses the attack dog, making it ever more dangerous. At one point Helen discovers him swinging the tethered creature around and round by its neck. When she objects, saying that he’s strangling the animal he replies: “‘Yes, I could strangle someone,’ he said simply, continuing to swing. He approached her. ‘I am that cold.’”(259).
At the start of their marriage he worried about Helen’s breathing and instructed her in ‘proper’ breathing technique, now as their relationship has collapsed into hatred and rage he attempts to take her breath away: “Ralph’s thumbs hooked themselves around her windpipe. … he squeezed almost courteously, as if he only meant to be holding her breath for her, and just for a moment” (263).
When his ever forgiving wife negotiates with Henry Chao, the old family friend (and Theresa’s lover) to secure for Ralph his former teaching job at the university, instead of rejoicing and celebrating, he grabs one of Helen’s precious decorative items, and hurls it, “a brass vase out [through] the living room picture window” (260).
Ralph’s male violence is no longer pregnant, but now borne, real, inevitable and life threatening. Not long after the vase, small and delicate Chinese-born Helen herself “went sailing like a human version of their brass vase, out the bedroom window” (262). In “Cheap, On Sale, American Dream: Contemporary Asian American Women Writers’ Response to American Success Mythologies,” Phillipa Kafka tells us “the picture window is Jen’s metaphor for the collapse of the Chang’s ‘picture perfect’ marriage”(Kafka. 119) and alleges Ralph’s violence is in response to intimations of Helen’s adultery, but Jen’s narrative has not yet acknowledged Helen’s adultery, and even if it had, Ralph’s physical violence rises to near murderous proportions. Like physically violent acts of sexuality, Ralph and Helen are now in constant congress, throwing words, items and each other around with the most serious intention of causing each other grievous injury. Despite Ralph’s diminutive stature, Helen is far out of her weight-class, but the words, “a failure, a failure, a failure” (Jen. 263), shouted at Ralph score a direct hit, and his violent physical response puts Helen in the hospital.
Are Kafka and/or Jen condoning murderous rage because it’s motivated by sexual jealousy?
Why is it appropriate to attack Helen and not her lover, Glover Ding?
How is this violence ‘ethnically derived?
Is Henry Chao held to the same standards?
For that matter is Theresa held to the same standards?
In “Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature” Elaine H. Kim tells us “family relationships dominated political and economic activities and served as a primary tool for social control. An individual’s reputation was his family’s reputation and one’s personal affairs could not be strictly one’s own”(Kim, 102)
If this is the case than Ralph Chang is damaged as much by his sister’s extramarital affair as by his wife’s extramarital affair, but he verbal attacks the taller, athletic Theresa, not physically. That said, the novel’s male instigated violence doesn’t end until Theresa’s life itself hangs in the balance in a scene startlingly similar to the car crash scene from John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

The troubles of this family are not the struggles that result from changing cultures from one country to another. These difficulties are typical of an oppressive male culture dependent on violence for authority and control. Rather than negotiating a mutually beneficial relationship that could have easily accommodated their individual needs, the Changs engaged in the ancient war between physically powerful men, of any size and nationality or culture, and less physically powerful women living in a state of oppression.
For the most part, the women in this story were willing to endure almost anything life hurled at them, including infidelity, poverty, dangerous living conditions, relentless work, a near constant state of oppression, and violence, yet they survived admirably.
Ralph Chang did not suffer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he carefully concocted an unnecessary catastrophe that was doomed to fail, for he depended too dearly on both the good will of strangers and the good luck of the gods. When both went against him, instead of retrenching and reassessing his options, instead of turning to the wisdom of his family he turned on them with blame, anger, and violence.
All of his travails were a direct result of this relentlessly destructively sexist perspective on life. Unfortunately, in light of his response to his previous failures, it seems quite unlikely that he actually learned anything from this, his latest catastrophe.

WORKS CITED
Dong, Lan. “Gendered Home and Space for the Diaspora: Gish Jen’s Typical American". ThirdSpace: a journal of feminist theory & culture, volume 4 issue 1 November 2004. Web. April 10, 2010.

Jen, Gish. Typical American. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.

Kafka, Phillipa. ‘Cheap, On Sale, American Dream’: Contemporary Asian American Women Writers’ Response to American Success Mythologies, pages 105-126, found in: American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature. Edited by William Blazek and Michael K. Glenday. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2005. Print

Kim, Elaine H. ‘Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature’. Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 87-112

TheFreeDictionary.com: Tart, a definition. Web. April 10, 2010

©May 10, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

My Own Thoughts Regarding Arizona's Racist Immigration Policy.

2010-04-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

Immigration, legal or not, is a complex issue. I don't know, nor care whether my very recent immigrant ancestors came here legally, probably not.

My father came to the states from England in 1928 or 9. My mother's father got here from France in 1905 or so. My mother's mother's parents fled the pograms of Germany and Russia, respectively, in the 19th Century.

I'm a Nuevo America but my daughter is Daughter of the American Revolution eligible.

Honestly, the whole 'Manifest Destiny' bullshit was just a cover for genocide. There were no empty places in America, ever. Even the so-called Native Peoples (Indians) killed or fucked the folks they found here until everyone looked the same.

The issue for me is one of boundaries. What are the boundaries of civilization?

Do we have the right to restrict immigration on any level or should all borders be open.

How about criminals? How about terrorists? How about folks who openly say they hate America?

Gays? I could care less about but I know two people murdered by drunken illegal Mexican immigrants.

Are all illegal Mexican immigrants drunks and murders? No. But the question remains.

Do we have the right to say no? Does anyone ever, anywhere, have the right to say no?

I 'own' property in Mexico. That's a lie. As an American I can't own the property I 'own' in Mexico so a Mexican bank 'owns' it for me. Last time I crossed (in February) I got shaken down for $75 by a Mexican cop. I could have resisted. I paid him the $75 and got to leave without a trip in handcuffs to the jail. I also got stopped by machine gun toting Mexican soldiers in the middle of nowhere. They 'fucked' with me until they got bored.

Should the Mexican American border be open?
Should the Mexican-Guatemala border be open?
It's not. They shoot people dead for crossing illegally there.

Complex questions.

I know there's not enough water in California for the 37 million people who live here now.

I know that the jobs I held (with other high-school drop-outs, 'Negros' , Indians and Mexican-Americans are now all held by illegal immigrants, predominantly brown-skinned.

I hire them, work with illegal immigrants, eat with them, go to school with them, get served by them and like them, but when does a country say 'too much'?

Complex questions.

I have no answers but I know what Arizona is doing is wrong.

That's a start.

William R. Hearst III on News & the Future of News

2010-04-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

William R. Hearst III is a partner at the powerful venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He serves on many boards of directors, perhaps most importantly The Hearst Corporation. According to its Web site, "The Hearst Corporation is one of the nation's largest diversified communications companies. Its major interests include magazine, newspaper and business publishing, cable networks, television and radio broadcasting, internet businesses, television production and distribution, newspaper feature distribution, and real estate."

Fred Dodsworth: Your family has been involved in the media business for?
Will Hearst: For over a 125 years.

Dodsworth: Where do you see the media business going?
Will Hearst: As long as people gather someplace and exchange information there are going to be institutions that gather information and package it, and to some degree, put their credibility next to it. When you say the media business you're of course including broadcasting and print and Internet and all kinds of different platforms on which people both gather and exchange and consume information ... and entertainment as well.

Dodsworth: What is the goal of that dissemination of information?
Will Hearst: It's the campfire. It's the place where people gather and compare notes. The ultimate question people are asking themselves is "How does my life compare to that life?" "How's it going to affect my life? " "Is there an opportunity here for me?"

We also read — and I mean read in the sense of view and consume and browse and search for information — for a kind of human dimension. When I read about Katharine Graham dying I thought, "Oh. My dad died a few years ago. And I know Don Graham." You tend to sort of take the dramatic events and the human events and personalize them. And that's just never going to stop. From the earliest imaginable human society people gathered around and compared notes, and that's what we're doing.

Dodsworth: You kind of started your career at Rolling Stone, an alternative publication.
Will Hearst: I like alternative newspapers a lot.

Dodsworth: The S.F. market has a great number of alternative papers. When one looks at the total readership of all the alternatives, it surpasses the readership of the major dailies.
Will Hearst: The other thing you're getting is you're getting a publication count that looks like the daily newspaper world of the mid-1950s when San Francisco had seven newspapers. We don't have seven newspapers today (chuckling) but we do have (at least) seven alternative newspapers. And that's not even counting the ethnic press.

Dodsworth: So what is the 21st century definition of an alternative newspaper?
Will Hearst: (Laughing loudly.) That's almost impossible to answer. I don't think you could make a definition. There are certain characteristics of alternative newspapers that seem to trend. Alternative newspapers tend more often to be weekly, rather than daily. They often tend to be smaller format rather than broadsheet. They often tend to excel in cultural coverage relative to the metro dailies. They often tend to underachieve in business coverage and sports coverage. And they tend to cover national politics, and to a large degree, local politics in what I would call an ideological coverage approach as opposed to a "paper of record" approach.
So if you (read) an alternative paper, you'll get better arts coverage, you won't find out what's going on in the business community, you'll get token sports coverage and you'll get coverage of city hall that's VERY opinionated.

I give a speech that usually irritates an audience of traditional newspaper people: "You want young readers? Double your arts coverage. Easiest thing in the world to do. It doesn't cost you that much and yet it absolutely is what the alternative presses are doing to kill you."

Dodsworth: Ideological coverage used to be synonymous with alternative press.
Will Hearst: Yes, and I don't mean to use that in a pejorative sense. I read, and I'm sure you do, LOTS of things from different points of view. I read lots of things from points of view that I don't always share. I think anybody that cares deeply about an issue, really, sincerely, should spend a lot of time reading the opposition press on that issue.

Dodsworth: I once heard attorney Laurence Tribe recommend The Wall Street Journal to a group of movement organizers.
Will Hearst: (Laughing.) The thing I like about The Wall Street Journal the best is its editorial pages. Not because I agree with them but because I think an editorial page is a contract to commit ideological journalism , and they're the only newspaper that really lives up to the contract in the sense that they write great poison-pen, withering-scorn editorials. If you could get the New York Times to write with an equally florid pen, from their point of view, you'd have a good day's worth of reading between the two of them.

Dodsworth: Is bias in the press an important issue?
Will Hearst: I think it's an important issue at every level of the business. In the same way that companies have cultures, newsrooms have cultures. I wouldn't make the case that there's only one way to do it and objectivity is always better than subjectivity, or visa versa. But I would make the case that you pick up a product of a culture and you read it for a while, you get a feeling. You either say, "This thinks the way I do." "This thinks the opposite of the way I do and challenges me." Or "These guys are trying to not take an ideological point of view," then the question becomes, "Do I trust them as newsgathers?"

A newspaper like the New York Times tries to take the paper of record strategy and the Bay Guardian takes a different approach and the American Spectator takes a different approach from them.

Dodsworth: Sorting all that out asks a lot of the reader.
Will Hearst: I think readers do this all the time. The one theory I violently oppose is the "Foie Gras Theory" — that you're sort of force feeding people information and there's nothing they can do about it. I don't watch or read anything that way and I don't listen or participate in conversation that way. What I'm doing, what you're doing, what your readers are doing, is every time they're reading something they're saying, " That sounds like B.S." Or " That resonates with my experience." Or " That's a strange point of view."

There's an active intelligence — I'm not saying critical, I'm not saying educated, I'm not saying analytical — I'm just saying there's a dialogue going on inside the brain of the reader that is looking at everything they're hearing. People are having internal thumbs up/thumbs down every second they're consuming information.

Dodsworth: In the beginning you said, "comparing themselves"
Will Hearst: They're comparing their picture of reality and they're comparing their picture of emotional life.

One of the things I think many people would agree to today is when you had a very white, very male media picture, one of the things that was wrong was a lot of people weren't seeing themselves. They were out of the dialogue. I think the whole media got stronger by making those changes — not in terms of "growing the audience," but in terms of more different places to feel agreement or disagreement.

Dodsworth: Race and racism are not popular front page stories.
Will Hearst: There are a lot of people who experience life in America through the prism of race. It affects their life. It's a major issue. To talk about race is no different than talking about baseball or talking about any other thing that touches a lot of people's lives. If you DIDN'T talk about race, you would be excluding something that a lot of people are experiencing everyday.

Now I don't experience it everyday. But I've listened long enough, and been told often enough to understand that for a lot of people it is a daily experience. It is a seven-day-a-week experience. It is the pre-eminent, running tape of their experience. If you don't introduce that topic, you're not letting those people find anything that feels like life feels to them.

If you define your newspaper as "I'm going to talk about the people in power and people who are about to be in power and that's the only dialogue I'm interested in covering," then you're going to be talking to a very small number of people, for whom that's their experience.

If instead you say, "I have a picture of a community — to go back to that word — that is my home-base coverage," than I think you have to turn the problem on its head and say, "Who are we? Who is the universe of people I'd like to be able to talk to in a relevant way so they find some experiences familiar and some experiences unfamiliar." Then you've got to talk about those issues. Then you've almost got to talk about the disparity between the community and the power structure, because for a lot of people, that's their experience of the power structure.

©April 25, 2010 Fred Dodsworth (originally written July 23, 2001)
This interview cost me my job at the SF Examiner. David C. Burgin, Executive Editor of the paper had been fired by Mr. Hearst, and Burgin knew I would have asked Hearst why. Of course Hearst told me. I didn't publish his answer but I probably should have. No one who knows Burgin would have been surprised by Hearst's answer.

Lit Crit: Nickel & Dimed by B. Ehrenreich

2010-04-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

The burden of personal history.
It is impossible for any of us to entirely escape the burden of personal history that colors our view of the world. Nonetheless, it is imperative for a reporter to be as objective and unbiased as possible. For Barbara Ehrenreich this was not possible in Nickel and Dimed. Her autobiographical book explores low-paid, ‘unskilled’ work in America after the Republican Party seized control of Congress in 1994 and passed (as part of their ‘Contract With America') the racially motivated and nativist* 1996 welfare reform bill known as “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,” or Welfare to Work. While Ms. Ehrenreich’s book deliberately and successfully confronts the “too lazy to work” mythology that drives the modern Republican Party version of capitalistic theory, the burden of her own personal history resulted in a book that was painfully and obviously discolored by her predominantly classist perspective on the problem of living with low wages.

Near the beginning of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich boldly states the implicit thesis that mars her work: “I am, of course, very different from the people who normally fill America’s least attractive jobs… (Ehrenreich. 6). In fact she’s too similar to the people who fill ‘America’s least attractive jobs’ for her to see them clearly, honestly and with self-recognized empathy. The world Ms Ehrenreich attempted to infiltrate and report from, from a class-perspective, is too close to the low status she and her family recently escaped for her to view their condition without this implicit and pervasive negative bias. We know this as readers because despite her claim to be ‘different,’ she immediate tells us the opposite. In ‘Getting Ready’ the introduction to Nickel and Dimed Ehrenreich plainly states: “In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away.” (2) Speaking of her natal family she acknowledges that not all of her siblings have faired as well as she has: “My sister had been through one low-paid job after another… constantly struggling against what she calls ‘the hopelessness of being a wage slave.’” (2) Even the man she loves knows wage-based poverty too well: “My husband and companion of seventeen years was a $4.50-an-hour warehouse worker …” (2). Each of these examples clearly identifies her immediate and personal experience of poverty and its debilitating impact of her own life and the lives of her closest relations, and calls into question her ability to be objective.

Reflecting her concerns about her own status, throughout the entire book Ehrenreich touts her laudable educational accomplishments, frequently for no relevant reason. Several pages into the first section of Nickel and Dimed her self-esteem is placed into crisis when she questions how she should answer a simple job query about her educational achievement s. Rather than tell the truth to her would-be employers, she creates a fabrication that conceals her success. She rationalizes this deceit by blaming the potential employer: “…I figured the Ph.D. would be no help at all, might even lead employers to suspect that I was an alcoholic washout or worse.” (5). Thus in Ehrenreich’s world no one can be both educated and poor. If an educated person is poor there has to be some other overriding personal failure such as addiction ‘or worse’ that strips the job applicant of the accolades and remuneration that should be theirs by right.

Ehrenreich’s classist perspective is almost ironic in that her chosen profession, writing, experiences poverty as the typical result. Ehrenreich is an exception in the profession. In example let me quote from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by another author, Sara Faye Leiber, published in the on-line arts magazine Guernica in which Leiber describes a typical interaction between a writer (herself) and a pest-control expert in New York City:
“…he asked me if I worked in the publishing industry, because apparently a lot of people in publishing get bedbugs, partly … because they make less money than people in other professions that they consider to be of their same status…”

Ehrenreich knows this is typical of the writer’s life, yet she fails to acknowledge the contradictory evidence even when she offers examples in her own narrative. At one point she despairs because mentioning her chosen profession failed to elicit excitement or acknowledgement of her elevated status: When filling out a job application: “… asked about hobbies, I said ‘writing’ and she seemed to find nothing strange about this…” (Ehrenrich. 5). Four pages later she notes in the voice of her husband’s uncle that writers are too well represented in the world of impoverished, low-wage earners, without a hint of apology for her previously elucidated classist perspective: “…my second husband … proudly told his uncle, who was a valet parker at that time that I was a writer. The uncle’s response: ‘Who isn’t’?” (9).

Displaying her classist perspective nakedly Ehrenreich descends into unnecessary class-based mockery:’ “he tells me about his glory days as a young man at ‘coronary school’ in Brooklyn… or do you say ‘culinary’?” (21). Combining this elitist perspective with a blatant play for the reader’s pity, the author describes Gail’s horrific, deteriorating, living circumstances which result in the low-paid worker electing to live inside her pickup truck parked behind work. In response Ehrenreich snarks: “With the Hearthside offering benefits like that, how could anyone think of leaving?” (32). These asides of authorial pettiness aren’t necessary for the story she’s telling, but they are telling about her values.

The author’s self-image is most at risk where she’s most likely to be witnessed as a ‘low-wage-earner’ by someone she knows. In the chapter titled ‘Serving in Florida,’ Ehrenreich seeks low-paid work close to her home in Key West, but is mortified at the prospect of being seen and judged by her peers and neighbors: “I am terrorized, especially at the beginning, of being recognized…” she tells us (11). Her fear is not of being confused with but as being identified as an actual ‘low-paid earner,’ so she carefully qualifies her diminished status as only a charade: “…but this is just an experiment, you know, not my real life,” (16). To compensate she indulges in play-acting: “Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess,” (19). Fifteen pages later, Ehrenreich uses half of a page to remind us in great detail she’s not actually a ‘low-wage earner,’ she’s a bona fide member in good-standing of the striving middle-class, complete with a house payments, fitness club membership dues and credit card bills.(34)

Another issue of class deliberately manifest in Nickel and Dimed is Ehrenreich’s word choices. Throughout the book she carefully chooses words that are far ‘above her pay scale,’ words that even the well-read reader would need to look up. I believe this is the result of a mostly unconscious, manipulative decision the author made to reinforce her sense of status while covering material that left her feeling vulnerable. In the chapter ‘Serving in Florida’ she describes the wait-staff as ‘agape’ (20). On first examination the reader would discover the word means ‘open-mouthed’. A closer look at that word leads the reader to the Christian Eucharist, and agape’s use as a reference to the awe-full, holy and consecrated love feast celebrating The Christ’s body as experienced at the Last Supper — this is hardly the sort of imagery one normally associates with serving as a low-wage waitress in an inexpensive corporate chain diner. In ‘Scrubbing in Maine’ Ehrenreich uses the word ‘soteriological’ while referring to her vacant Alzheimer’s patients. That word references the theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus. In ‘Selling in Minnesota’ the author describes a Wal-Mart manager as the “apotheosis of servant leadership.” “Apotheosis,” a theological term, describes the elevation of a person to the rank of a god, the act of deification.

I believe Ehrenreich uses such words deliberately and both slyly and contemptuously. She doesn’t expect the reader to look to her word choices as a second text to the book. The author has constructed a thicket of esoteric and obscure words she’s slipped into the text to show the sophisticated reader that she is no hack writer, no low-paid toiler in ink’s wretchedness, that she is not like the people she’s working beside.

Condescension and judgment aren’t enough, time and time again throughout the book Ehrenreich focuses on her subject’s trials and tribulations, the horrific circumstances of their condition. She does not allow them to shine with pride at any of the real accomplishments that every human being achieves each and everyday, despite their struggles. In doing so, Ehrenreich strips them of their dignity and individuality. As she tells their stories the reader is left with feelings of pity and dehumanizing distance rather than affection and familiarity. Instead of recognizing their similarities and empathizing with the working poor, Ehrenreich portrays the working poor as a ‘different’ people, not unlike the way people of newly elevated stature view people of different faiths, places of origin, or skin color.

The working poor are different, Ehrenreich tells us and then she shows us. After only working just a few weeks in a low-paying job she finds herself becoming a ‘different’ person. “Something loathsome and servile,” she describes her newfound self. “…in a month or two I might have turned into a different person altogether—say, the kind of person who would have turned George in.”(41). While Ehrenreich blames the work, and suggests she might rise to the occasion (as her father and her husband did), she still leaves the reader with the impression that the average ‘low-wage earner’ wouldn’t have the inner strength to do so. Towards the end of Nickel and Dimed, in the chapter ‘Selling in Minnesota’ ‘Barb’ acknowledges that she has become that lesser person: “…I sense at some level I’m regressing. … So it’s interesting to see how Barb turned out—that she’s meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I hoped.” (169). Recall that at the beginning of the book Ehrenreich insisted: “I made no effort to play a role or fit into some imaginative stereotype…” (7)

The problem isn’t that she’s different from any other working-poor person. The problem is that she fails to understand poverty as an artificial social-construct. Living in a state of relentless, desperate poverty strips most human beings of their self-respect, their empathy, their noble ideals and concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps poverty is carefully designed to this. Whether or not by design, poverty is the ideal condition an aristocratic, class-structured society would use to create a class of the serfs willing to live to serve the regal nobility of the rich.

There is no reason for poverty in this the richest country in the world, especially for people willing to work and work hard. Any of us, all of us, could and are likely to easily slip through the cracks and end up in America’s No Exit of relentless penury and powerlessness. This is the real lesson of Nickel and Dimed, although I’m not sure the author knows it.

This lack of objectivity undermines Ehrenreich’s real, relevant and actionable issues of inadequate wage compensation for a rapidly growing number of Americans. I am currently living next door to a man in his 60s who received his masters in Architecture from Harvard University. He has been out of work for two years now and has gone through all his savings. Recently he took a minimum wage job driving automobiles from one car dealership to the next. He is about to lose his house and frankly, if he doesn’t find work suitable to his abilities and financial needs, he could easily end up with an alcohol problem that wasn’t in evidence for the more than 30 years he had a job that reasonably covered the cost of living here in the Bay Area.

Ms. Ehrenreich’s vanity concerns about the social perception of her current status in this world, and her fears of slipping permanently back into that lower status negate her ability to give her readers a chance to empathize with the everyday humanity of her subjects. She owes it to her subjects and her readers to represent the working poor with the same sort of interest and affection Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel was able to effortlessly express in this masterpiece, Working; People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Ehrenreich did not craft a dry economic analysis of wages vs. living expenses in the United States during the late 20th Century. She told a personal story where she used real people’s voices, manners and circumstances to fill the voids in her narrative and to invest the reader in the outcome of those people’s struggles. ‘Barb’ might succumb to the nasty, judgmental tone that fills this tome; Barbara Ehrenreich should not.

The issues of Nickel and Dimed are no longer the issues of just the lower classes. Wage stagnation and job losses are now severely impacting the middle and upper middle classes. Class warfare between the bottom and the middle classes only serves to further diminish the power of all but the most elite in our formerly equal and democratic country. Unfortunately Ehrenreich’s inability to surmount her biases interfered with the reader’s opportunity to see her subjects in their best, rather than their worst light. She has prevented her subjects from getting a chance to celebrate their own successes and for us to build on them. There has never been a more relevant time for Ehrenreich’s observations and analysis, minus the pejorative class discolorations.

*Lacayo, Richard, et al. “Down on the Downtrodden.” Time Magazine December 19, 1994. April 19, 2010 . Web.

Works Cited
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Print.

Lieber, Sara Faye. “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Guernica/A Magazine of Art & Politics March 2010. April 19, 2010. . Web.

©April 19, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

On their backs and against the wall.

2010-04-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

Before founding SAGE in 1993, Norma Hotaling was a homeless, heroin-addicted prostitute for eight years. She is determined to help other women and men leave prostitution and addiction behind, and find their lives off the streets. SAGE also offers classes and counseling for first time offenders who are cited for solicitation.

Fred Dodsworth: Should prostitution be legalized?
Norma Hotaling: Research shows that when you have an adult sex industry, you have a natural progression to child prostitution. It's very crucial we talk about that.
Another thing is the domestic violence movement has analyzed itself after twenty years and found that women were still being killed at the same rate as when they started it. They had this whole building of infrastructure -- safe houses, hot lines, better response by police, etc. and women were still being killed at the same rate.

Dodsworth: Why?
Hotaling: We haven't been working with men. Big duh. We've been doing everything to protect the women, but we haven't looked at men -- the socialization of men.
There were many factors that led towards violence towards women. One of those things is a man's expectation of service… Anything. Be on time. Be here. Be isolated. Give up your mother.
So the conflict is, on one hand, we have domestic violence where we really need to know how men are socialized and how we teach them to expect service. On the other hand, we have the discussion on the legalization of prostitution, where it's okay to expect service. What ever you want. If you're a little horny, OK expect service. You're a little angry, expect service. You're getting older, expect service. You don't like the way your wife treats you, you can expect service.

Dodsworth: If they can afford it.
Hotaling: All you need is $5. It's not just men who have a lot of money — it's women being economically deprived and men figuring out how little they can offer. In Amsterdam, the women in the windows are not making a lot of money. I've been there. They're not making any more money than the women on Capp St.

Dodsworth: Does a woman ever consciously chose to be a prostitute?
Hotaling: Some women say that they do but I think the number of women who have such limited options, that number is much greater, because of the economic and political structure that women have to operate under.

Dodsworth: Do you think sexism is institutionalized?
Hotaling: Absolutely. I work with customers of prostitutes a lot. It's a problem when men that are governing the political and economic structure that women have to operate in are customers of prostitutes, are tricks.
Dick Morris and his involvement in the Clinton administration is a perfect example. Remember the Welfare to Work Act? It was right before the Democratic convention and Dick Morris was saying to the president, "Pass this bill. It'll get you elected." The rest of his staff split with him over this issue. They said don't do this, it will hurt women and girls. So here you have a trick, a john, a customer of prostitutes saying it doesn't matter if it's going to hurt women and girls. They're only there to help you get elected and so use them for that.

Dodsworth: Are you saying Welfare to Work drives women into prostitution?
Hotaling: Welfare to Work drives women into prostitution. Work. It's just work. It's just a job. Nobody has come up and said, "Wait a minute. How does that affect our communities of color?" Prostitution thrives, thrives on poor, vulnerable women and girls, communities of color that have been isolated from the mainstream society -- bad education, racism. Prostitution, it's just work.

Dodsworth: Is this only an issue in communities of color?
Hotaling: The men in my program, when I ask them to describe their perfect prostitute, tell me bond, blue-eyed, white and young.

Dodsworth: How young?
Hotaling: Well, they're not going to tell me in the class that it's 15 and 16. But what they do tell me is they know if they continue in prostitution that they are prone to go with children.
I've had over 5,000 men in my classes that I've had a chance to sit and talk to for eight hours at a time. We talk about what kind of issues you bring to prostitution. We did an interview project with 260 customers. What's the best part about sex with a prostitute? ONE MAN said sex, said a blowjob.
The rest of them? The hunt. Nobody to nag me. It fits in with my job schedule. All these things about disconnection and hunting human beings.
So when I ask them, what do you bring to the table? "I'm lonely." OK, do youyou're your loneliness met in prostitution? "No." Why? "Because she doesn't really like me." No, she doesn't. "She doesn't know me." No, she doesn't. "She's lying to me." Yes, it's a hustle.

Dodsworth: They don't know this going in?
Hotaling: I think they really do know it. I would hope they know it. My God. What would that say for the men of the world?

Dodsworth: That would say that men see all women as exactly the same.
Hotaling: Or it's, "Oh I'll pay her and pretend she's 18 even though she looks like she's 15." "She's blonde." Bleached. "I want her to say she likes me." Ok, she says she likes you. "I want her to smile." Ok, she smiles. "I want her to call me Daddy." OK, that happens.

Dodsworth: Are you saying we're all tricks?
Hotaling: I am saying that we collude with the whole structure that moves women into prostitution and exploitation. We collude with women not really having equal access. We collude with society that says women have to be nice, have to be sweet, have to say that they like men, have to serve men whenever men want them too. And that men deserve all of that and more. We all collude with that.

Dodsworth: What do women deserve?
Hotaling: Women deserve to be equals. Women deserve to have their human rights. Women deserve not to be hurt and exploited and not have violence. Women deserve to have equal access to education and vocational training and economic security, as men do. Women deserve to be mothers. Women deserve to have families.
The women and girls that SAGE works with have had their human rights raped and beaten away from them, starting in early childhood.
And then on top of it, we have the discussion of legalization and decriminalization. It gets condensed into that. That makes me furious. It doesn't get condensed into, "How can we help women and girls be whole again?" Not whole, but whole again. Or for the first time. Because the women and girls I work with never had a chance.
This is not rehabilitation. This is habilitation. When they get raped as children, they don't study the same way as other girls. And when they can't sit in their chair in the first grade or the second grade or the third grade, people that should know better start telling them that they're the problem. And that just creates a whole movement right into being vulnerable to prostitution. Men in our society are not caretakers anymore. They are exploiters.

Dodsworth: What does that say about all women?
Hotaling: That's our background to follow our husbands. Be nice to men. To support them.

Dodsworth: Is the world big enough for men and women to be equal?
Hotaling: I think it's absolutely big enough but people need to be uncompromising in their belief about women.
Society has said there are people that we can just throw away. I was almost there. I was created to be a prostitute. I was created to be a drug addict. Human hands molded me, day by day in my life, and moved me right down that path. And society moved in, and stood by those people and said, "Yes, she is a bad person. She deserves it."
What is it about the human condition that makes it ok to judge and treat human beings the way that we do? Who's saying, "Whoa!"?

On the web: http://www.sageinc.org/

©April 12, 2010 Fred Dodsworth (originally written June 16, 2001)

Thanks for the memories -- Anon and the Dead Cat

2010-04-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

I don't actually remember your name. Perhaps it's because you didn't live in my neighborhood for very long. Perhaps it's because your familial name became substantially tarnished after you left unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. Later I overheard my father telling someone your father had paid for the new family home with a "bum" check. I can imagine buying groceries or clothes with funny money but buying a house with a bunko check takes a lot chutzpah. I guess it sort of goes along with helping your dad steal "swamp coolers" off people's roofs to resell. You told me about that. Frankly, there just can't be too much money in that business.

The day I most clearly recall you, we were exploring an "abandoned" house in our mutual neighborhood, our kiddy kingdom. I don't think we'd managed to break in to the locked-up building yet, we were still in the backyard where the lawn had grown deep and dark and thick. I remember it was a late afternoon with long shadows and no one had traipsed into that yard before us to knock down a path through the green grass. We were adventurers charting our own course in a spooky urban "forest" when we saw an odd furry lump nearly buried in the weeds. I can't say which of us decided the furry lump needed to be poked but I do recall finding a long stick — one certainly didn't want to get too close to whatever it was — and poking the clump of fur.

The hair covered skin slid off like an old lady in a fur coat slipping on an icy path. Neither one of us expected the cat's skin to slide away so easily. Nor did either of us expect to see such an incredibly lively mass of movement as the thousands of maggots that were feasting on the cat's corpse desperately recoiled from the air and the sunlight. Frightening as it was, that wasn't actually the worst part of our adventure — not even close. The worst part was the incredible, eye-burning, gut wrenching stench that immediately overpowered us both and left us gasping, violently retching and running desperately away from the horror and disgust of such corruption. We went separate ways. There's only so much space in a day for that much decay.

©April 4, 2010 Fred Dodsworth (originally written Feb 7, 2003)

Plush Love

2010-04-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

When Cary’s marriage fell apart, so did he. The idea of dating another woman was more than he was able to hold in his heart. Just before his wife left she told him she’d faked every orgasm, every act of intimate affection, and that he was a terrible lover who always left her dissatisfied. This was said to him in cold fury after he discovered she’d betrayed him with a mutual friend; they were moving in together. Obsessively he pictured them naked, tangled in the throes of their passion. The smell of her slightly sweet-sour sweat mixed with the musk of sex and sperm haunted him. Even more than her, he hated all women.

After she moved out, he found a teddy bear he’d given her early in their courtship. Like him, she’d left it behind. At first he took the bear to bed because her scent lingered on the plush toy. When his sexual hunger returned, he masturbated with the small stuffed bear pressed into his face, inhaling the residual fragrance of his lost love, meager substitute for his missing partner. The man and the bear began a comfortable nightly routine. When he felt the pain too deeply, when he missed her more than he could bear, he would talk through his feelings with the little creature. Often these conversations ended in tears.

Together they worked through the hard times and Cary’s broken heart began to mend. In place of longing, his anger and passion grew larger than the hurt. Over time sex with the little doll got rougher and rougher as he came to understand the bear could never return the love Cary felt and lost.

One night in a fit of resentment he ripped the crotch out of the creature and shoved his penis between the torn fabric, deep into cotton inside. Rocking back and forth over the little mound of fake fur he brought himself to orgasm with a loud moan, spurting his seed all over the soft white stuffing inside. There was something profoundly satisfying about defiling this token of his love. The bear didn’t complain.

Night after night for weeks Cary abused the plush toy in the same fashion until the stench of his own rotten semen was more repulsive than the carnal and emotional satisfaction he received from ravaging the small doll. For a moment he considered tossing it into the washing machine but then he realized he was done with the past. It was time to move on.

©April 4, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

Lit Crit: Pidgin by Lisa Kanae

2010-03-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

Pidgin (...with added logorrhea).

Lisa Kanae uses typography, delineation, size, orientation, and language to visually manifest the conditions of imperialistic oppression and the visceral response of the less powerful. Using both the specific language and its visual representation, Kanae and her graphic designer, Kristin Kaleinani Gonzales, show how a people create an identity and how an oppressive system uses that identity and its lingua franca against those same people. In this example the language of the oppressed has naïve elegance and simplicity that transcends cultures, and which deliberately contrasts with the officious voice of inflexible, crushing authority.

All the elements of this essay can be examined for context, and each element evolves in the same fashion, but in the interest of limiting the scope and length of my paper, I am only going to analysis the ‘voice of authority,’ predominantly using it’s typographic presentation.

The first four paragraph depictions of the ‘voice of authority’ utilize a very quiet, traditional thin-serif font with a condensed x-height and extended ascenders to express a formal command structure and to establish the implied lineage of authority, sotto voce. Footnotes and bibliographic references (without supporting substantiation) enhance the presumption of authority. In each instance the text remains clinical, analyzing the presumed pathology of the inferred speech.

Upon the fifth instance of the authoritorial voice, four paragraphs are utilized on one page and the size of the font is randomly and dramatically increased with bolding elements added, in response to ‘pidgin’ questions regarding the authority’s validity. The visual inference is of desperation and the loss of control. At this point the text directly refers to the Creole dialect for the first time, differentiating it from a speech pathology to a locally responsive language. This passage directly attacks ‘pidgin’ as a substandard and subservient language. The social construct of ‘masters’ and ‘servile population’ are also introduced as social-intellectual elements of the dialogue.

The sixth depiction of the authoritorial voice has been knocked sideways and is crisscrossed with lines as though negated and boxed in, indicating a fast approaching limit to its power. The text devolves into racist demagoguery: “the speech of ‘inferior beings’ and adds yet another bibliographic reference in a desperate attempt to reestablish it’s primacy. (We saw a similar response last night to Health Care Reform where members of the Tea-Bag branch of the Republican Party reverted to hate-speech and name-calling when confronting imminent defeat.) The facing page was left blank as though the authoritorial voice was momentarily speechless.

The seventh and eighth depictions of the authoritorial voice are withdrawn intellectual responses with a palpable sense of defeat as the graphic depiction reverts to its original quiet, restrained form. The text in the seventh paragraph again implies, but does not directly state, that the Creole language is pathological or ‘lazy,’ with limited capabilities of understanding, but the sense is we are seeing the ‘last hurrah’ as it were, of a resigned and dying intellect and power.

The final two authoritorial voiced elements sum up the struggle. The last but one examines the social implications of language and the supremacy of an evolved aggregate language, which now represents the new authority. The final passage, “I am one voice out of that one million," while in the same serif type used by the now deposed ‘master-class’, is loud and proud.

The new, traditional ‘voice of authority’ speaks for and from the formerly oppressed class.

Lit Crit: Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

2010-03-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

What is a Girl?
(…with apologies for my Anthropology 1A take on this English 1A assignment)

‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid uses an angry avalanche of predominantly female adult voices offering mainly criticism mixed with little pieces of advice carefully designed to instill self-doubt, destructive sexist expectations, and social fears into a young girl. The purpose of this symphony of condemnation is to disempower the girl, to hobble her sexuality, and to make her lot as a nursemaid seem dignified and noble. Only twice does the youngster answer (in italics). In both cases she responds defensively, but in each case she is ignored.

While the piled on statements in ‘Girl’ appear as simple instructions: “Wash the clothes on Monday,” “this is how you make a button-hole,” “this is how you sweep the yard,” “iron your father’s shirt,” these comments are deliberate designed to limit her options and diminish her sense of independence. Each statement reaffirms the communal mindset that works incessantly to restrictively define the feminine persona, both by setting forth her responsibilities, and by limiting her natural inclinations. Repeated three times are instructions to on how to smile; similarly repetitive are directions on how to set a table, clean a home, grow and cook food.

Where are the suggestions she might teach, run a business, defend her country from oppressive colonial capitalists, lead her people to freedom? Instead these voices insist she will become a wife and a mother, the alternative being that she becomes “the slut you are so intent on becoming.” Repeated three times directly and once more in inference in the very last sentence, the slut she is so intent on becoming represents the greatest social concern expressed in Kincaid’s story. Apparently suppressing a young woman’s natural sexual impulses requires the most effort, the most repetition, and the most intense condemnation.

Saying this young woman is going to become a ‘slut’ affords her elders a means to control her. All humans are intensely sexual, whether they act on their continuous and pervasive sexual impulses or not. To call a woman a slut, irrespective or her age, is to ‘animalize’ her into a powerless state. Her natural sexual impulses are used against her, destroying her sense of autonomy, controlling her behaviors, including her sexual actions. What purpose is served by prohibiting a woman, young or old, from acting on her ever-present sexual impulses? Are we successful at controlling these natural proclivities?

Repeated genetic studies have determined that as many as thirty percent of the children born in first world countries like the US, Canada and the UK, are not genetic linked to the man listed as father on the birth certificate (see The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Matt Ridley, 1993). It is reasonable to presume this percentage is similar in less economically established countries. This figure is more than a little ironic when we consider that it is men who are encouraged to ‘sow their wild oats’ with sly winks and ribald accolades from both genders.

“The view that it is permissible for a man, but not a woman, to commit adultery has persisted almost to the present day” says Reay Tannahill in Sex in History. Some studies show that infidelity by men married more than two years runs as high a 72% (Women and Love, Shere Hite, 1989). But that is not the end of the story, Hite found the same rates of infidelity for women: “70 percent of women married more than five years are having sex outside of marriage” (ibid). With the average act of coitus lasting only three minutes and with a lifetime average of 2,000 sexual acts for every pregnancy, the odds and opportunity for undiscovered infidelity are quite good.

The culturally accepted phenomenon of male infidelity is widely acknowledged, as are the benefits: genetically linked offspring. What is not as widely acknowledged are the benefits that accrue to promiscuous women. Those benefits include increased access to assets, more genetically successful offspring (the ‘Beautiful Son’ theory of sexual selection), and expanded social support-networks. A woman who has multiple sexual partners often also gains a coterie of men to protect and support her if her mate becomes abusive or rejects her, and similarly, increased likelihood of protection and support in the instance of her mate’s death.

Especially in matriarchal and/or deliberately non-monogamous groups there is great benefit for the offspring of sexually available women, especially in a group that is genetically similar. The child of such a woman could be the genetic heir of any of the men with whom she was sexual. Under such conditions nearly everyone in the community would have a genetic investment in the survival of her progeny.

While there are historic examples of temporary periods of sexual abandon, such as the bacchanalian practices of the Romans and Greeks, most modern people attempt to ignore, deny or discount similar social experiences we actively and enthusiastically participate in today. Carnival, Mardi Gras, disorganized ‘frat parties,’ carefully orchestrated wedding parties, organized orgies, Jack-n-Jill-offs, Power Exchange events, and The Exotic Erotic Ball are just a small example of the wide spectrum of orgiastic practices we casually and recreationally indulge in today without severe social stigma.

To further ameliorate negative social judgment, most modern acts of sexual abandon involve alcohol and/or drugs. This allows the participant to deny responsibility.

“I was drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing,” or “I was drunk and didn’t know what they were doing to me,” are frequent responses to deliberate acts of female sexual abandon.

That is not to say there aren’t risks, especially in our patriarchal society, though clearly not enough to substantially impede widespread ‘sluttish’ behavior. In addition to possible male violence on herself, children in ‘families’ where either of the adults is genetically unrelated to the child are 60 times more likely to die than in those where both adults are genetically linked to the child (Red Queen). A sexually active woman also faces the risk of destabilizing her current relationship and ending up in a more precarious financial circumstance. As women control more of their own assets, including employment opportunities, this becomes less of a constraint. In societies with high levels of government-covered family support, including the USA, today, the rates for out of wedlock childbirth have increased substantially. It’s no longer imperative for the modern women to wait for a male provider to begin her reproductive journey. Even more common is a form of ‘monogamy’ where the modern woman is likely to have children with one or more men, within a series of short-term marriages. Whether that’s her intention or not, it is the result.

That said it appears that the main purpose and result of the widespread practice of condemnation, criticism and fear-mongering regarding women’s sexuality is to disempower women. It remains perhaps the most effective means of denying and undermining their claims for self-sufficiency, while limiting their aspirations and options.

Actions Have Consequences: Ryan Lau part 2

2010-03-17T18:53:00.001-07:00

While Berkeley City Council District 2 representative Daryl Moore says his aide, Ryan Lau, made a mistake in replacing an old funky garage with a larger living structure without obtaining permits or zoning approval, it appears the mistake is much bigger, more expensive and more problematic than simply paying a higher fee. Lau was ordered to cease construction on Monday, March 15, 2010, by Building Inspector Greg Heidenreich.

Berkeley’s building code specifically sets out ‘Development Standards for Accessory Dwelling Units’ that appear to prohibitively restrict the type of development Lau has already built. Deputy Planning Director Wendy Cosin was not optimistic that the city would be able to approve Lau’s project without a variance and in the city of Berkeley obtaining a variance is nearly impossible she acknowledged.

The first obstacle to issuing a permit is the size of Lau’s ‘Accessory Dwelling Unit. The estimated size of Lau’s nearly finished project is 432 square feet. According to the code (Section 23D.16.040), such structures are restricted to 300 square feet or less. The specific language of the code states: “No more than 25% of the gross floor area of the main dwelling in existence prior to the construction of the Accessory Dwelling Unit,” with an exemption that allows a building up to 300 square foot if the main house is smaller than 1,200 square feet. Lau’s main dwelling is less than 1,200 square feet but the building he has nearly completed is almost 44% over the upper limit.

Additionally the code specifically excludes building less than four feet from the property line. Apparently Lau has built the entire structure on the side property line
“In no case can zoning approve this if the setbacks are less than four feet,” said Deputy Director Cosin. “If he doesn’t meet the standards he’ll need a variance and it is very, very difficult to get a variance.”

Ironically, any person seeking a variance from local building codes has to get approval from the Zoning Adjustment Board. Ryan Lau is Councilman Darryl Moore’s appointee to that board.

While one local reporter stated that in attempting to resolve this issue promptly Berkeley’s Planning Department was expediting Lau’s permit, Cosin insisted that wasn’t the case.

“We’re handling this the same way we would handle any other violation,” Cosin said.
Any other treatment would be preferential and ethically improper. It is possible for Lau to pay an extra fee to expedite the permit process, which is available to any applicant, but Cosin said that Lau is “not at the building permit stage.”

As of Wednesday, March 17, 2010, Lau has not applied for zoning clearance which he must do before he can turn in a building permit application.

If Lau does not get a variance, the council-aide would have to tear the structure down, Cosin said.

While neither Lau, nor District One Councilman Darryl Moore, nor Mayor Tom Bates, nor City Manager Phil Kamlarz, nor Deputy City Manager Christine Daniel (formerly of the city attorney’s office) returned this reporter’s phone calls on Wednesday, other city staff expressed concern about the underlying issues this violation has exposed.

“I’m confused about how that can be allowed without him resigning his aide position. He’s a city employee. Seems like a conflict of interest,” said one Berkeley staffer by email. That person requested I not use their name. “In light of your discovery, it seems the only reasonable action is to remove him from ZAB (credibility shot and not fit to rule on similar situations) and he should be fired as an employee (violated the oath we take to uphold all rules and regulations).”

Another city employee, who also did not offer his name, suggested Berkeley City Auditor Ann Marie Hogan’s office should investigate Lau’s ethical lapses.

Hogan said all city staff except the mayor, council members, and their staff and appointees, are required to sign and abide by a code of ethical standards crafted by her office and the office of the City Manager that specifically requires they adhere to the laws and regulations of the city. The city manager administratively adopted that code of ethical standards for all city staff. Compliance with that code of ethics is not enforceable with the Mayor, the city council or their staff and appointees.
The mayor and council members, as elected legislative officers, do not report to the city manager’s office, nor do their aides or commission appointees, Hogan said.

“City council staff are hired and fired only by the City Council,” Hogan said. “They are ‘at-will’ employees.”

Similarly commission appointees only refer matters back to the city council, they actually don’t have any ‘authority,’ Hogan said. The mayor and city council must approve all commission actions.

“It’s never a bad idea to adopt a code of ethics,” Hogan said.

Regarding Lau’s lapses and his continued presence on the Zoning Adjustment Board, neither Cosin nor Hogan was willing to comment.

Councilwoman Linda Maio (her aide is Nicole Drake, Lau’s tenant and partner) was more forth coming.

“No,”Maio responded bluntly when asked if Lau should remain on the Zoning Adjustment Board. “I think not!”

The Rules are just for Fools in Berkeley

2010-03-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader.
There are two types of people in Berkeley: rubes like you and me, and there are the elite. The normal rules that rubes live, bleed, and die by don’t apply to the elite. The elite needn’t follow the well-established required procedures nor abide by municipal regulations. They’re special and they know what’s best for us, and what’s best for them.

One of Berkeley’s most onerous departments of rules and regulations is its Building Department. If the average citizen rube wants to replace a water heater, stove or even a light switch, the law says he has to pull a building permit. If the rube want to repair his front porch, he has to turn in working drawings and a lot map, and pay hundreds of dollars to get said building permit. I know from personal experience.

Heaven forbid after buying your 1,145 square-foot house for $435,000 less than a year ago, as Ryan Lau did, you should want to tear down your miniscule old and decrepit garage built in the 1920s and replace it with a lovely residential structure twice as large and located far less than the required four feet from the property line. If a rube wanted to build too close to his neighbor’s property he would have to get a ‘Use Permit,’ which would likely require a public hearing and cost the rube thousands and thousands of dollars. He might even end up in front of the Zoning Adjustment Board!

Of course if the person who wants to do such a thing is named Ryan Lau, Councilman Darryl Moore’s long-time aide and appointed Commissioner to the Zoning Adjustments Board, rules mean nothing.

Zoning Adjustment Board Commissioner Ryan simply tore down (without a demolition permit) all but the front of his funky old 10x20 foot garage and replaced it on the property line with an elegant residential-style structure more than twice as large (roughly 12x36 feet). Mr Lau left one wall of the teetering temporary front façade of the old garage still standing precariously, the better to hide the massive construction project in-process behind it. The new building is lovely and substantial: taller, wider, nearly twice as long. It offers the proud owner lovely wide windows and double French doors in front, and what looks like a bathroom, rear entrance and bedroom in the back.

Mr Lau, the well-paid Aide to Councilman Darryl Moore from District 2, didn’t apply for a use permit for such a magnificent project according to Aaron Sage, Senior Planner at City of Berkeley. Mr Sage was manning the Zoning Department desk when I submitted my request for information. After researching the issue Mr Sage looked quite uncomfortable saying that no Use Permit, nor any other zoning permit had been issued.

It seems Mr Lau didn’t bother to apply for a building permit either according to two different Building Department employees who researched the question for me when I submitted my official written request at the building department’s information counter. Normally a building permit would require zoning approval, site plans, building plans, neighborhood meetings, and probably a zoning adjustment hearing (in front of Mr Lau and/or his friends on the board)!

When I went to Mr Lau’s house to speak with the owner and see and photograph this extravagant violation of the city’s building and zoning codes, a woman, who I assumed was Nicole Drake, Mr Lau’s significant other, came out of the house and screamed threats at me repeatedly and claimed she called the police. Unfortunately she refused to identify herself or to speak to me about the construction project. There was no work-card/permit posted anywhere in sight, as is required by regulation. Ironically enough Ms Drake is also employed by the city of Berkeley. She is District 1 Councilwoman Linda Maio’s well-paid Aide.

Like many in Berkeley, over the years I have become more than a little familiar with the workings of code enforcement. I have been red-tagged (an immediate work-stop-order) by the city numerous times, typically for doing minor repairs to my home, and once for work I wasn’t doing!

My son, Asa Dodsworth, has had Gregory Daniel, Berkeley’s chief code enforcer, and Maurice Norrise, Mr Daniel’s subordinate, at his home so frequently he wonders whether he could legally charge them rent. Through much effort Asa has managed to get the city to reduce the fines imposed against him for planting vegetables in his median strip and similar such extravagances reduced to only several thousand dollars from a much, much higher figure, but the city continues to bagger and harass him relentlessly.

Many years ago Berkeley’s building department cited me personally for most of the entire Uniform Building Code (according to Court Commissioner Jon Rantzman). All for naught, Commissioner Rantzman dismissed every citation. When this mayor’s wife was our mayor, I was again cited for new laws they were making up almost as quickly as they were writing the citations. Again for naught, the city promptly rewrote its new laws several times before deleting them entirely.

I attempted to contact Mayor Tom Bates regarding Mr Lau’s violations, especially in light of his position as a city council aide and a zoning adjustment board commission member. One of the Mayor’s Aides spoke with me, and then with the mayor, and then came back and took my phone number. I heard nothing more. I also attempted to speak with both Councilman Moore and Councilwoman Maio regarding their Aides’ involvement in this violation of the public trust. Neither called me back but I wasn’t surprised. The voice on Ms Maio’s telephone answering machine seemed to belong to Ms Drake.
I also spoke with Gregory Daniel of Code Enforcement. He insured me he would treat this matter with the same professionalism he gave to every other code violation in Berkeley. Mr Norrise said ‘Hi.’

It’s a real shame I’m not an important person in Berkeley. If I was important I’m sure the city would treat me and my son as cavalierly as the city treats Zoning Adjustment Board Commissioner Lau. It would be fun to just do whatever I liked without regard to the laws and regulations of our community. Much more likely because of this little report I expect someone from the city will soon be knocking on my door or my son’s door looking for forbidden flowers and vegetables or evidence of new paint and repairs. Berkeley’s that kind of place.

All the dogs you can eat.

2010-02-06T19:33:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of my first year in high school I decided I needed to become self-sufficient. Asking my parents for money wasn’t worth the discomfort of listening to them complain about the impossibility of raising four children on a teacher’s salary. At 14 years of age I became a Der Wienerschnitzel employee.

The man who hired me was probably old enough to drink alcohol — legally. He assigned our schedules and made sure we had supplies to serve the hungry hordes. Every morning he accounted the cash we collected the prior evening and every two weeks he distributed paychecks.

We learned to defrost heavy, cardboard-boxes full of frozen dogs before grilling them, and how to steam the stale dried-out hot dog buns so they resembled something edible. ‘Chili’ for ‘Original Chili Dogs’ came in enormous rectangular lumps of unidentifiable congealed greasy brown matter, which got melted on the stove, and sauerkraut came in one-gallon cans.

Our young manager also explained we were responsible for cleaning the restaurant at the end of each day and he explained why we needed to do that ‘off the clock’. We were underage, he said. A person under 16 wasn’t allowed to work an eight-hour shift during the school week. That meant weekdays our shifts started at 4 p.m. and ended at 11 p.m. We were allowed to work until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Company policy was to take orders until closing, so ‘off the clock’ didn’t start until we served the last dog and closed and locked the order window. Most nights we’d finish cleaning well after midnight, sometimes not until two in the morning. This made it a difficult to get to class at 8 a.m., but at the end of each pay period we had almost 100 dollars in our pockets — a lot of money for a 14-year-old at the time.

In addition to $1.25 per hour, working essentially unsupervised in a fast food restaurant meant we could eat and drink as much of Der Wienerschnitzel’s product as we could stomach, and there was no one to stop us from ‘goofing around’. Every day we’d see who could concoct the most disgusting hot dog topping combinations. These we’d give away to our friends or the occasional hungry bum. Mixing chili glop, processed cheese, and sauerkraut with a Polish sausage pushed the limits for us. We weren’t the unruly the teens working at the nearby Taco Bell who collected desiccated ‘dog shit’ from the empty field behind their restaurant and mixed it with their chili sauce. I still won’t eat at Taco Bell.

On occasion things reeled out of control at the hot dog stand. One night a group of drunken high school boys grabbed the cash register off the walk-up counter and tried to stumble away with it. They brought it back when I insisted, and I gave them free hot dogs so they wouldn’t think I was a dick for preventing them from stealing Der Wienerschnitzel’s cash register. Another time, when I was alone in the restaurant cleaning up after midnight, a very drunk young man drove the wrong way through the drive-through, scraping his car against the building and gouging up the entire passenger side of his new white Cadillac. When I told him we were closed, there was nothing to eat, he leapt from the car with a large bowie knife in hand, and ran toward the window screaming: “I just fucked up my dad’s new car. You’re going to feed me!” I quickly locked the window and called the police. Reluctantly he went back to his car, cursing, and disappeared into the night.

Eventually our young manager quit. No one replaced him. We continued along well enough on our own for a few weeks, maintaining the routines he’d established. Supplies came in as scheduled and we would get calls from the head office in California letting us know that a new manager was on his way. But as every day passed without this man’s appearance I started to worry there would not be anyone to give me my paycheck on payday. I decided to take either a $10 or $20 bill out of the cash register every day to cover the hours I worked.

My adventures as an underage corporate employee came to an end one Friday evening when I showed up for my shift and found Salice Jones, my classmate and co-worker, acting miserable and guilty as she explained that she hadn’t been able to get anything prepared for the dinner shift. The place was filthy. A half-melted hunk of ‘chili’ slumped over the edge of the chili pot, dripping onto the prep counter. Stale buns were stacked in the storage room in their delivery boxes, still hard as rocks, as were the frozen dogs in the walk-in. There was nothing to serve anyone but already cars full of hungry diners had lined up all the way from the drive-up window out into Scottsdale Road. Salice disappeared with another apology and I realized it was all over. I closed the order window and called California to let them know I quit. The woman on the phone asked: “Please, would you put the key in the register and lock the door when you go?” I told her I would and tucked one last $20 bill from the cash register in my pocket while our would-be diners sat in their cars wondering what it was they wanted for dinner.

Der Wienerschnitzel never sent me my last paycheck. I can’t say I was surprised.

©February 6, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

My Earliest Writing Memories

2010-02-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

Reading and writing came to me later than most and with great difficulty. Unlike my classmates, I was neither a proficient, nor even a halting reader. In the third-grade, while everyone else was teasing out the pronunciation of words for our group reading assignments, I was illiterate. My inadequate abilities retarded the rest of the class. As I fell further behind the skill-set of my peers Mrs. Mathis, my teacher, made it clear I was not among her favorites.

Sent from a noisy classroom to the quiet, empty school library, realm of gray-haired, be-spectacled Mrs. Mueller, I sat at our librarian’s side hour after hour as she schooled me the ways of the alphabet and the manner in which words and incredible stories could be drawn from the pages of books. Books became my life, a safer place than the chaos and dysfunction of home. Asocial and awkward I retreated into those tales and read nearly every book in the school library Mrs. Mueller later told me.

Writing was different, for despite my love of words my penmanship was mostly illegible and my spelling atrocious. Faced with a writing assignment I would set at a table with a sheaf of clean, blue-lined paper and a stash of freshly sharpened yellow pencils and proceed to create a wastebasket full of crumpled papers. Some were marred by large, ugly smudges. Others had holes worn all the way through. Shredded into pieces or wadded up, none escaped to the classroom. After a while I simply gave up and ceased to turn in writing assignments. I wasn’t a writer.

While in high school I listened attentively, contributed to class, and did well enough to earn a passing grade or better. Dropping out of high school in the middle of my senior year, I coincidently avoided having to turn in the required senior thesis. Even in my first attempt at college 30 years ago I didn’t write. In a class on Shakespeare, like everyone else, I was assigned a written final of ten pages. Without discussing the matter with my professor, I turned in ten pages of hand-drawn illustrations of mythical microscopic agents responsible for Richard III’s divided motivations, Lady Macbeth’s ambition, King Lear’s madness, and Romeo and Juliet’s ill-fated love. I was given an A, and the professor used my work as an example of a worthy and innovative academic response to Shakespeare.

As things happen, many years later I ended up on the business side of publishing. As publisher of San Francisco magazine I promoted myself to editor in the early 1990s when my editorial staff walked out in a snit over an aesthetic decision I made. Similarly I became a writer when Dave Burgin, executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner attempted to force me out by relieving me of my position as features editor and assigning me a daily, front-page column in 2001. His plan failed wonderfully. It seems the combination of spite and cash money was more motivating than academic expectations or accolades.

Now at the ripe old age of 59, I've decided it's high time for me to get a college degree. As most folk think of retirement I have re-thunk* my academic career. This time I plan to do it write.

*Thunk (thngk) v. Nonstandard: A past tense and a past participle of think.

©February 2, 2010 Fred Dodsworth

The Berkeley Downtown Plan

2009-11-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Berkeley Downtown Plan — the City Council/Planning Commission sell-out of Berkeley’s downtown — has been temporarily delayed, not stopped. While a direct vote on the plan would probably fail, a negotiated settlement between Mayor Tom Bates and the referendum organizers Patti Dacy and Jesse Arreguín could lead to badly compromised plan that improves a few inconsequential social amenities in exchange for giving developers carté blanche to build numerous enormous buildings, some likely to be over 20 stories tall. Alternatively the city come back with a substantially revised, but not necessarily improved, plan. I think it’s way past time to ask why are we here?

Is it to cure our downtown’s ills?
If we're trying to cure downtown’s ills is the reasonable prescription injecting a dozen or more 20 story buildings into the mix in hopes of bringing vitality back by the sheer number of bodies? OR is our downtown ill because the rents are just too high for anything but women’s clothing shops and fast food restaurants? At $3.50 a square foot, most of the retail shops that would bring vitality to the downtown can’t survive. Yet $3.50 a square foot is what Berkeley’s most visible retail Realtor/Developer, John Gordon, is telling landlords their property is worth. And yet there’s vacant retail property everywhere you look.

The 20,000 sq ft Tower Records Store on Durant off Telegraph has been vacant for almost ten years!
Radston’s Office Supply was driven out by increased rents after more than 60 years in Berkeley. We lost as much as $400,000 a year in sales tax from Radstons, and a dozen jobs, yet the building hasn’t been rented in two years.
Black Oak Books was paying $17,000 a month in rent to one of Berkeley biggest landlords (who also owns the Tower Records building on Durant) and now that space which was once a beacon is now a blight in my neighborhood, collecting graffiti and housing the homeless in it’s protected doorway.

Or maybe we’re trying to appease the University.
I ran into Mark McLeod on Shattuck Ave. last week. Mark used to own the now-closed restaurant that went by the name of Downtown. I’ve been told he lives in the city of San Pablo but he’s still president of the Downtown Business Improvement District board and he’s still a big proponent of more development in Berkeley’s downtown. As we walked down Shattuck, McLeod told me with a straight face that if we didn’t give the University what it wanted –a million square feet of development rights in our downtown – the University might pull up stakes and leave the city of Berkeley. PLEEEEEEEASE.

Just another developer/property-owner give-away.
I think we’re actually trying to appease property owners and developers and their enablers on the city payroll who would like to see those privately held lands hit the all-time jackpot, a once in a lifetime-payday as they turn our low-rise, people-friendly landscape into canyons of steel (allegedly ‘green’ steel, but theft none the less).

When I first came to California, in the very early 70s, there was a citizen’s effort to control high-rise development in San Francisco. The catch phrase was ‘Stop the Manhattanization of San Francisco.’ At that time the TransAmerica Pyramid was a skyline icon you could see for miles, from everywhere. Those people failed and today, you can barely see the once enormous, once iconic pyramid building now buried underneath San Francisco’s newer bigger, taller, less-human skyscape. This is where Berkeley’s headed if we don’t stand firm for the values that make Berkeley a beautiful, world-class town, a place you want to live.

Do you know WHAT is the most profitable crop in California? It’s not marijuana. It’s not strawberries. It’s not fancy arugula for restaurants like Chez Panisse. The most valuable crop in California, or any other place, is enormous buildings. I didn’t make that up, that’s a quote from Gray Brechin’s book Imperial San Francisco — like Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities — it’s a highly recommended read on urbanization.

I’ve spent nearly 30 years tracking development in the Bay Area. Trust me, if we allow one landowner, one developer to build a 20 story building on their property in the city of Berkeley, every landowner downtown will want the enormous monetary sums they can get for a building site that allows buildings 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 stories tall. The nature of development is to ask for more. If we give them 20 stories, they’ll want 30. If we give 30, they’ll ask for 40. The scales of economies will force them to ask for more. That’s why I say we have to Downzone the Whole Damn Downtown to four stories. That won’t stop developers from building 5 or 6 or even 8 story buildings, but it will slow them down and it will give us some control over our environment.

Plain and simple lies.
I’m not going to call anyone a liar, but it’s reasonable to challenge a lie.

If the University doesn’t get carte blanche to build a million square feet of in our downtown, Cal isn’t going to pull up roots and roll down the road to Fremont. Remember, it’s not just in the downtown that Cal is expanding. Cal has an on-campus building program scheduled to add nearly a million square feet the next ten years. And that’s not all. The National Laboratory — which has already added hundreds of thousands of square feet to their facilities in the recent past – also plans to add about a million square feet of development in the next ten years. Between just those two programs that’s another 6,000 cars minimum, parking, speeding, in a hurry to get through your neighborhoods because they’re late for work, late for picking up the kids, late for a very important date. Like it? If we shoehorn more oversized office buildings into our downtown and that’s what you in the surrounding neighborhoods like this one are going to see.

We’re also been told by ABAG (the Association of Bay Area Governments) that we have a moral obligation to add housing in Berkeley to absorb California’s ever-increasing population.
Of course, Albany, Walnut Creek, Palo Alto and many of the other surrounding communities ignore ABAG. Of course the affordable housing we’ve added is anything but affordable. But ABAG threatens to restrict some federal funding options if Berkeley does not add approximately 387 new units of housing PER YEAR!!!!! Put in perspective, the enormous oversized, inappropriate, sore-thumb in our downtown known as the Gaia Building has only 91 apartments. ABAG is saying that we need to add MORE THAN FOUR Gaia Buildings a year –each year -- for the indefinite future! And that would still be 23 units short of ABAG's mandated ANNUAL minimum! There’s another thousand new bodies every year and an approximate equal number of vehicles. Like that picture?

Please note that at this time, California is actually losing population because there aren’t enough decent paying jobs in California and living expenses are just too high. In other words ABAG’s rationale for insisting on more housing has disappeared but it’s mandate hasn’t.
While we’re talking about resources we need to acknowledge that most of California is basically an arid desert. Look at pictures of Berkeley before the Great Earthquake and you’ll see scrub brush and grasslands because that’s all that could naturally grow here. We’re using far more water in California, than we have. Our current 37 million population is drinking and flushing the toilet because we’re stealing water from neighboring states and Mexico and from the Native People of California who have rights to water by treaty that we have ignored to this point in time. That party is over. Recent Congressional and judicial actions have affirmed those Native rights and the cost of flushing your toilet, the cost of boiling your tea, is going to skyrocket just like the cost of gasoline and power have because there isn’t enough water for the people who are here now, let alone millions more who are allegedly coming in the future.

Don’t get me started on how we’re going to take care of those additional people in our already over crowded schools and hospitals, with our over extended fire and police and social services. AND DON’T tell how the new development is going to pay for these necessary service increases because every case study I’m aware of says the exact opposite.

Threatening our way of life
The political and financial pressures being brought to bear on our community are powerful, well-connected, well-financed, relentless, and ruthless. If we don’t say NO to the Manhattanization of Berkeley, if we allow our city council to give away that which makes this a wonderful place to raise children and grow old, we will have given away the best of Berkeley for nothing. Somewhere in Berkeley at some point in the near future, the people of this wonderful community are going to draw a line in the sand and say that enough is enough, that we’re not willing to surrender the quality of life we love for some developer’s second or third home. The town we love is under attack and it will not survive in anything like it’s current form if we don’t defend it. It’s time for the citizens of Berkeley to talk to their neighbors about more traffic, more speeding cars, more people, and more giant ugly buildings. Write letters and make phone calls: Tell your council member to Downzone the whole damn Downtown. Let San Franciso or Oakland be Manhattan. Let Berkeley be Paris.

Wine by the Generation

2009-11-17T20:22:00.000-08:00

Originally published June 10, 2001

For more than five generations Jeff Bundschu’s family has farmed, harvested and created fine wines in Sonoma County. Is there anything left worth doing for a young-man in an old-wine family? Jeff thinks there's plenty and he's happy to be in charge of the family business.

Fred Dodsworth: Jeff, do you consider yourself a farmer, vintner or manager?
Jeff Bundschu: I don’t think you can run a winery or a vineyard without being a manager. My aspiration in life is to manage an entire cohesive unit from the time Jose Luis lays the cover crop, all the way to the time that vine is producing a berry, and makes it to the winery and then into a bottle. What we have that’s so unique is total control over the entire estate. You rarely see an operation owned by a single, focused owner without having to blend outside grapes or without the pressure of larger projects.

Dodsworth: One of the complaints I’ve heard about the wine industry is the use of pesticides.
Bundschu: The beautiful self protector when it coming to pesticide management is that anything you apply to those berries is going to show up in the wine, either in the way it tastes or in the way fermentation goes. There’s a natural barrier there that ensures that the fruit that ends up making wine is pretty much naturally produced. I can’t speak for the whole industry but I can say in the case of North Coast vineyards – Sonoma, Napa – there’s a huge effort to move away from unnecessary applications. Some wineries are going to the extreme level of organic certification. Others, like ourselves, are pursuing a program of integrated pest management. We don’t use any pesticides except in the case of very special outbreaks. We going to be responsible for pesticide use but we also have a responsibility to preserve our crops.

In California there’s always going to be a tenuous relationship between agriculture and developing communities. There are a lot of people that didn’t grow up around tractors disking in the middle of the night, or sulfuring in the middle of the night or fans going on and waking you up. It used to be that your neighbors all grew up in a farming community and understood that those noises were part of making a living. It’s definitely a big issue but I’m coming from a place where you’ve got to be respectful and respond to their legitimate concerns. That doesn’t mean we have to stop what we’re doing but it’s just being a responsible neighbor. You got to trust that the majority are going to respect what you’ve got to do to make a living.

Dodsworth: Who actually started this winery?
Bundschu: My great-great-great grandfather Jacob Gundlach bought this vineyard in 1858 and started his winery in San Francisco. The house was designed by the same architect that did Jack London’s “Wolfhouse” in Glen Ellen. My grandmother still lives in one section and the main offices are in the rest of the house. It’s still very much a family feel, too much so occasionally, given how close quarters are. There’re a little too many signs that it’s been here 140 years to my liking if you get my drift.

Dodsworth: Is your dad still involved?
Bundschu: He’s always been the farmer. The vineyard has always been his main focus.

Dodsworth: How has your family managed to keep the family farm?
Bundschu: I’m the sixth generation to be doing this. The way that the business has always been passed on is not in order of birth or anything like that, it’s been who’s been engaged in the business. There was never any pressure to come back, in fact it was the opposite. The encouragement was not to study viticulture, it was to go out and to make sure if you came back that the decision was your own. That’s the advice my grandfather gave to my father and my father gave to me.

The unspoken reality of inheriting a six-generational family business is you’re here to preserve it, you’re not here to grow it and sell it. There’s a definite understanding that you’re working in a place that will be around a long time and you want to do well while you’re here. The winery’s ability to stay intact is more important that who owns it. That’s the way it goes. I’m trying to build the place and ensure that once my time here is over that it stays alive and successful as the family goes on. The pressure has been more from me than anyone else.

I guess the thing that’s made it survivable was that I went into it thinking I could add value. I didn’t go into it thinking this was some crown jewel that had everything intact and my job was just to polish it. My perception was that I could take this to a whole new level. My own fear is that I could discover I’d not lived up to that.

I’m in this because what I’m doing here brings joy to my life. If I got so involved in the process of making the wine and I couldn’t enjoy what it’s intended to do, I have come too far. I’ve watched people of my dad’s generation come to terms with being in families while running companies. Too often I’ve seen cases where the companies succeeded but the families didn’t. That is one thing I’m striving to avoid. If I have to go broke but I get to see my daughter every night, that’s a price I’d gladly pay.

Dodsworth: Let’s talk about food and wine.
Bundschu: Genetically I’m pretty well disposed to be a food and wine lover. (Laughter.) Food in my family has been the focal point for our social gatherings. A good cook is not defined by doing back flips in the kitchen. It’s more somebody who understands what good ingredients are. I learned from my family that the quality of the ingredients impacts the taste of the most basic meal. We always lived with our wines as an accompaniment to great big family meals. Breaking down how our wines would go with different foods is not something we every made a practice of. Usually there’s way too much more fun things to talk about around our table.

Dodsworth: Do you ever send wines back?
Bundschu: Five percent of all wines are corked, and that’s going up. You can smell it as much as taste it – basically a musty, locker room smell. It’s common enough that you’ve probably tasted it if you buy wines in restaurants.
Generally speaking, if you send wine back you should never be embarrassed. I was always coming from a place were I wouldn’t want to make a big stink, but they’d much rather have you send stuff back than leave with a bad impression of the restaurant.

Dodsworth: I frequently feel stupid when ordering wine.
Bundschu: To be honest, if we’re not talking about Northern California wines, I pretty much have to throw my hands up and trust the server. I can either buy what I know or take advantage of the sommelier’s efforts in putting his wine list together and let him go to town for me. A good restaurant should have a good wine list and a great restaurant has a sommelier that knows each of those wines.

Dodsworth: Talk to me about alcohol and alcoholism.
Bundschu: There’s no question to me that alcohol is something you’ve got to be responsible with. I’m privileged that I can enjoy wine and lead a productive life but I respect that there are some people in our community that can’t. Fundamentally I hold those people responsible for their own actions. I think most producers of wine are very responsible in the way that they show it and live it, at least wine in our category. I think if you look around here you’re going to see a pretty healthful lifestyle.

Dodsworth: How much is appropriate to drink a day?
Bundschu: I think it’s completely up to the individual. For me a glass and a half or two glasses a night, occasional lunches, not a regular lunch. I’m not afraid to drink at any time but I definitely view it as a privilege that I respect. I never take it for granted.

E-mail Fred Dodsworth at fdodsworth@comcast.net

Gang rape is a spectator sport.

2009-11-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Watch almost any movie these days and you become the spectator in the sexual victimization of women. It ain't about the love, nor is it about honest sexual desire, it's all about objectification. 'Baby, You ain't come a long way, yet.'
This is a cultural phenomena we all play a role in creating. This attack was not sexual in nature, this was a violent hate-crime using female sexuality as a weapon to dehumanize a 'representative' of an oppressed class.

The first step is to addressing this issue is to acknowledge the underlying value choices we all make. The more folks talk about the commodification of sexuality, the more we will be able to consciously decide whether this is what we most value.
I carefully use the words 'commodification of sexuality' rather than 'objectification of women' because people of all genders suffer when we deny our humanity to focus so intensely on our sexuality. Make-up, 'fashion', 'sexy' lingerie are simply the American/Western version of the burka -- sexual signifiers that overwhelm the power and integrity of the person within.

tell me a story? Pleasssssssssssse!!!!

2009-10-22T16:43:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a big city far away. No matter how she tried, love was hard to find. She would see someone that was fun to look at but when she got close their feet were too big, or hair grew out of their noses, or their mommy's were too close or too far away. The worst that might happen is she would love them but then they would discover that her feet were too small, or there were two hairs that grew out of her belly button, or that they didn't like the color of her eyes as much as they thought they should have.

She was certain she would never find love and if she didn't find love she would never be happy. She didn't understand that being happy would make her irresistible to love. She didn't understand that Father Time had a plan and that what she thought she wanted wasn't what she wanted at all. Life is about swimming in the waters of time but not drowning.

Every fish is perfect for the purpose it was made. Every person lovable to just the right person at just the right time. And what's really funny it that there are soooo many 'just the right persons,' if you give yourself time. It's easy to want what's not available, it's hard to be happy right now, especially when everyone else seems so happy.

It didn't seem fair to the little girl but Father Time smiled at her just the same and told her everything was working out just as it should. If only she would let herself be happy, nothing else would really matter, and all that she wanted, and especially all that she needed, would come her way at just the right time.
love and kisses.
the end

Local Racism, 2004

2009-09-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

This was spray-painted on the front windows of the newspaper office after word spread through the community that reporters from the Contra Costa Exclusive were covering incidents of racism in Martinez, California, in 2004.

Race Haters: A small and ordinary city confronts the great American problem.
By Fred Dodsworth (This originally ran in the Contra Costa Exclusive, now defunct, June, 2004)

Painter Dan was troubled. Well past mid-life, with gray hair and a tan, worn face that traced the roads he’d traveled around the U.S. Daniel Johnson came home to Martinez having seen the larger world. These days he was quick to tell even strangers his hometown wasn’t well. It was too small. He didn’t like the new people. He wasn’t so sure about his old friends.

Sitting out on the plaza between Starbucks and Bank of America, sipping a cup of coffee, Dan was man who had a need to talk. On one sunny day he decided to talk about his good and old friend Dennis Davis. Davis owned J&D Embroidery, a small shop on the edge of town that had contracts with both the City of Martinez and the Martinez Unified School District. Davis also taught girl’s golf at Alhambra High School, and had done so for years. Among other logos, for a small fee J&D embroidered Nazi symbols on baseball hats: SS Boys, with Hitler’s Storm Trooper’s twin lightening bolts substituting for the SS. It seemed incongruous to Johnson that the local high school golf coach would sell such a hateful symbol, even to kids.

Skateboarding by as Johnson spoke was a tall, thin, powerfully built man of indeterminate age. CoCoNut, as Stephen Payne called himself, wore no more than a pair of raggedy shorts and a sleeveless, open front vest that fluttered behind him. He was stained with dirt that hadn’t seen soap in days. He could have been 20. He could have been 45. His eyes were pinpoints and his lips stretched in a smiling grimace tight across his teeth. Tattoos covered his chiseled chest and drum-tight belly. In a large curve over his left breast was the word ‘Contra,” over his right “Costa.’ His abdomen said ‘County.’ The back of his left arm featured “Wermacht” in old German script. The back of his left arm, “Weiss.” White Power.

CoCoNut raced up and down Main Street Martinez on his skateboard, pirouetting between cars, leaping curbs and skittering sideways in loud, grand sweeping arcs. Stopping to chat with high school kids and tattered, burned-out human wreckage alike, he would infrequently reach inside his vest and from a small pocket extract something and hand it over discreetly. The fragile old lady’s who strolled Main Street with canes for support gave CoCoNut wide berth.

White Power, White Pride, White Race, Peckerwood, Woodpeckers.
Scattered widely about Contra Costa County are such tattoos, and more. Martinez, as county seat, home of the County Jail and the County’s Superior Court, had more than its fair share of such tattooed lost souls. Alhambra High School students speak about the young athlete with a Nazi Swastika visible on his arm. During this year’s Opening Night at Alhambra, an origami display featured swastikas. Kids sign their yearbooks with swastikas. The Assistant Principal and the Superintendent of Schools separately admit that occasionally swastikas get scrawled on school property along with Jewish student’s names. And baseball hats with such hateful symbols are confiscated, the administration says.

Made to order by J&D Embroidery Shop in Martinez, the SS-Boys logo refers to Adolf Hitler’s hated and feared secret police. The Nazi regime was responsible for the deaths of over 25 million people during WWII, including an estimated 12 million European Jews. Today, American neo-Nazis use such symbols to intimidate ethnic minorities. The owner of the shop taught golf classes at the high school.

“You should have been here last week,” said an administrator who didn’t want her name in the paper. “I threw out a huge box full of hats with much worse stuff than that.”

Nicole Bristol, 15, knows the pain such symbols cause. A cute short young lady with a shy demeanor and reddish hair, Bristow attended Sequoia Middle School in Pleasant Hill. After being subjected to hate-language from kids in her seventh and eight grade classes simply because she’s Jewish she decided to home-school.

"I was really isolated,” Bristow said. “I had one friend, and she was teased too. They called us dykes and Jews. We were scared."

Alicia Kane, Jenny Jorgensen, Angelina Martinez, Ashley Greene, Jessica Ellingson have known each other “since we were babies.” The young ladies attend Alhambra where they say pernicious racism is a pervasive and on-going problem.

“The school really did try to stop it, because you can't wear Confederate flags. You can't wear symbols or colors or bandannas. But some teachers they don't even try because it's like, ‘What's the use?’ ”

The young women believe teachers should educate students about different cultures, and lead class discussions about racism. But in the end they’re not sure how much difference teachers can make when so many children are imbued with racist beliefs by their parents.

“I don't believe in tolerance because tolerance is acceptance. You can't accept hate,” said Martinez Police Chief David Cataia. “Parents need to educate their children, and children need to understand, hate is not accepted.”

In early May a fight broke out at the Martinez Marina Park. Rumors of the impending violence had run rampant throughout the community all day. A group of Black teens and young adults and a group of White teens and young adults gathered in the late afternoon, trading insults, some of a racial nature. The Martinez Police stood by until the law was broken when the two men came to blows. The fistfight was very short. The first punch that connected took out 21-year-old Jesse Lucero’s three front teeth.

The young black man responsible was arrested and Jesse was carted off to the hospital.
Jesse and his mother Kim Lucero insisted they were only at the park for a late afternoon family picnic, but Jesse changed his story several times. After saying he was just there for a family picnic, he said he was there to defend the honor of a neighborhood girl (who is White) from disrespect by a young Black man. Later he said the fight was actually a battle between two towns: Pittsburg and Martinez. Despite the obvious inference that Martinez was a White Town and Pittsburg was a Black Town, Jesse insisted the fight was not racially motivated.

“These kids are not realizing what they're getting into,” said Jesse’s mother, Kim. “What they don't realize is Pittsburg's down here to show up for a fight. Nobody from Martinez showed up. Pittsburg's got big balls right now. They got guts. Think about it. They came here. Nobody from Martinez can even support their own town. So they had free run of Martinez.” She chuckles mirthlessly.

“And who did the police go after? The Martinez kids. So you know, Pittsburg's like, ‘Hey, we can go and do whatever the hell we want now.’ ”

Alhambra High School students pose giving a Nazi salute while congregating in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store.

An old Claudia Shear interview, for Kimberly Vergez

2009-08-25T16:09:00.000-07:00

Dirty Blonde, playing Mae West
By Fred Dodsworth, special to the SF Examiner
May 13, 2001

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers, femme fatales and mamma mia's in our lives. Today's Q&A is Claudia Shear who wrote and stars in Dirty Blonde -- a tale of adulation, adoration and self-acceptance featuring iconographic proto-femme Mae West. Dirty Blonde plays at Theatre on the Square through June 17th.

Fred Dodsworth: We live in a world in which women are expected to behave in certain ways and…
Claudia Shear: Do you think that’s true? It’s certainly less true then when Mae West was alive. There’s no question with things like divorce and child custody and salaries and discrimination that it isn’t a little better now. As far as the way women behave… (pause) it’s not like women aren’t able to do what they want. Women are able to be shocking now in a way Mae West couldn’t have done. It’s just that Mae West was more shocking because there were stronger rules, it was a more Puritanical time.
You know William Randolph Hearst helped destroy her career. His papers refused to take advertisements for her pictures. One of his editorials asked, “When will Congress do something about Mae West?” He was very influential in creating a backlash against her and of course he was part of the whole thing with the Hayes Commission and the decency code. They cut her scripts to shreds. They weren’t letting her be funny anymore.

Dodsworth: What do you mean by funny?
Shear: Dirty! Funny! Raunchy! Bawdy! Suggestive!
By the time she got to “Belle of the 90s,” she had a line like “I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole” and they made her cut it. They were so afraid of what people were going to say. This is a woman who was arrested and sent to jail, who did a play called “Sex,” did a play with gay men. Her films were wildly successful but there were a lot of people who were very shocked.

Dodsworth: Shocked by what?
Shear: She has sex all the time. She is clearly a prostitute. She ends up with a guy. The Hayes Censorship Act says a life of crime must always be punished but she kills somebody in “She Done Him Wrong.” In “I’m No Angel,” she’s hustling guys but she ends up as a rich socialite. Married, happy ever after? This is not the message they wanted to send.
And she’s clearly a woman who’s not a virgin, who’s having sex all the time, who likes it a lot, who is aggressive about it, assertive about it. You can understand why this was upsetting people.

Dodsworth: But that was before the “Decency Act.”
Shear: It was Mae West movies and the Fatty Arbuckle case that shocked people and they cracked down.

Dodsworth: The Fatty Arbuckle case happened here in San Francisco.
Shear: One of the greatest travesties of justice in the history and who did it? William Randolph Hearst. Fatty Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials and the jury gave him an apology! But by then he was destroyed. Nobody would hire him. There was no question he never killed the girl. It was a salacious news item. Hearst saying look at these disgusting people, look at their disgusting orgies. Hearst was one of the greatest hypocrites that ever walked this planet.

Dodsworth: I don’t actually think that our times are that different.
Shear: I agree with you actually. “A plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.”

Dodsworth: But to me the more interesting issue is how women are demonized.
Shear: Mae West was definitely demonized by Hearst but the thing is that she liked being shocking. She knew that she was shocking. She liked that.
There's the whole other question, which is homosexuality and how people deal with that. Mae West showed gay men actually talking to each other, that they existed. It wasn’t like there was a gay subculture. You know what I mean? There was the eternal bachelor. The whole thing of homosexual culture was totally different. So she was really in the forefront of that.
There were men who had acts where they would come out in gowns and be female impersonators but it was considered family entertainment. You would take mom and the kids to see this. But it wasn’t really attached to having sex with other men. Then she did “The Drag” and things like that and suddenly people were like “Do you mean these guys in dresses actually want to be girls? They want to have sex with men? Whoa, wait a minute!”
These guys were wiped out. There was this really famous drag performer. Julian Eltinge was his name. He was reduced to bringing out a rack of dresses, pointing to them and trying to do his act! He died in penury.

Dodsworth: Today that would be performance art.
Shear: They wanted to see him dressed up as a girl doing his campy thing!

Dodsworth: Do you think there’s a misogyny in that? Is it making fun of women?
Shear: I think that there’s a flavor of that sometimes. It’s such a fine line. It’s not that I would accuse anyone of misogyny but Marlene Dietrich, when she dresses as a man, is not the object of ridicule. It’s the sexiest thing in the world.
You know the world is a big place, lots of things are allowed. But a woman dressed as a man is taking on power. Look at Hilary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry,” there’s something really powerful about her because she has suppressed her secondary sex characteristics as a woman and therefore she is a man in the world. You take on a certain power if you dress as a man.
If you dress as a woman on some level you’re also taking on a power. A man who comes on stage dressed as Joan Crawford or Lipsinka! Lipsinka comes out on stage and this is a person of power.

Dodsworth: What is the root of that power?
Shear: The root of the power is when people transform themselves into what they feel they are, into what they feel they should be.

Dodsworth: So it’s transformation into true self?
Shear: Into what you imagine yourself to be. It’s why brides are always beautiful. The dumpiest girl in the whole world, bless her, the day of her wedding she will be beautiful. Because for most people it’s the one time in their lives where they wear a custom-made gown, where someone does their hair and their make-up, where everybody looks at them. They glow as a result of it and that runs through to everything.
I’m a big dresser-upper and how that transforms you. A lot of the time I’m in my sneakers, I’m in my T-shirt, I’m going to work out and yet when I transform and I’m in Manolo Blahniks and the Florentine cocktail dress, it’s a whole different persona that comes out. You know what I mean? When I go to Paris, for example, where I spend most of the time in a cocktail dress or out of the cocktail dress (half-laughs), it’s like I’m a different person.
But you know the thing was that Mae is really actually complex which is a thing that many people flatter themselves thinking they are...

Dodsworth: Everybody’s complex!
Shear: Everybody’s complex, but it’s not manifested in quite the same way. They’re just not simply as interesting. I don’t think Sandra Dee is as interesting as Mae West. It’s not the same conflict. Which is one of the things about drag that makes it so powerful is that underneath there’s this profound conflict (pause) between what we’re seeing and what we know to be true.

An old Mark Morris interview, for Mare Earley

2009-08-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

Mark Morris Speaks
By Fred Dodsworth, special to the Berkeley Daily Planet
Sept 28, 2003
Mark Morris and his eponymously named Dance Group regularly perform for Cal Performances at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall — so much so that some claim the globally renown dancer/choreographer as an honorary citizen of the People's Republic of Berkeley. Certainly Morris is a member in good standing in the 'cultural revolution,' as his footprints are stomped all over what is modern in today's dance world. In addition to founding the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980, Morris was one of the founders of the White Oaks Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The Mark Morris Dance Group opened the Cal Performances season with L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato on September 4th and returns to Zellerbach Hall September 12 through the 14th with a 'Repertory Program' of dance featuring the music of the late West Coast composer Lou Harrison, a world premiere of dance to the music of Béla Bartók, and a nine-song dance-cycle to the recorded music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
As we spoke Morris, dressed in shorts and a plain tee-shirt, laughed easily. Unexpectedly pudgy for a dancer, and with longish, straggling gray hair, the 40-something Morris had just spent the afternoon wandering unnoticed around Berkeley.

Fred Dodsworth: Your music is rhythmically challenging. How do you teach dancers to work with complex rhythms?
Mark Morris: How do I teach rhythm? I'm good at it and smart and my dancers are brilliant and we practice. You have to have something to start with though. If you're interested in something you work on it. If need it for what you do, if you have an interest in it then it can come true. If you don't need it and you're not interested, you'll never learn it. (laughs)

Dodsworth: You're in your 40s, as we age our bodies change, how does that effect you, as a dancer?
Morris: Well, I don’t know. I'm going to dance a little bit longer, not a whole lot longer. I'll keep performing some but not forever. Because it's less… it's more… it's more trouble than it's worth at a certain point — to warm up for two hours to dance for five minutes when it used to be the other way. It takes longer to recover from injuries. Of course I'm way smarter about certain things, I'd be much better at some things, if I could [just] do those things but that's always how it works. That's normal.
You know I'm a lovely dancer and I continue to be and when I don't want to I won't. But I'm a very good teacher and I can still choreograph and I'd rather watch other people than watch me. (laughs)

Dodsworth:Can you envision doing dance for older bodies?
Morris: I already do. The youngest man in my company is 28, which doesn't seem like much but in dance or in other things that require that sort of work, you know, like athletics or something, that's very late in your career. So it's different if you're an instrumentalist or a writer or a painter or a choreographer, of course that's different. But I work with… they are already older dancers, they're in their 40s and that's old for dancers and that's great but you have to have been a good dancer and then stay a good dancer. You know just cause you've made it, you're old and you're still dancing doesn't mean you're good. It just means you're old. It doesn't mean you're wise. It means you're old.
I was co-founder of the White Oaks Dance Project, which was originally 'older' people, but it changed as it went along so that just Misha was an old 'thang'. It's fine. It's a possibility. I don't think it's the future of dancing, is everybody getting old. If you can still dance when you're old and you make stuff up and there's still good work to do than it's great but it's not like a mission. (laughs)
I don't work with little teenagers, I mean they're great and they're fun sometimes. At the San Francisco Ballet I'm working with much younger people and that's fine but to tour and work and live with these people… I don't want them to be 17? There aren't very many good dancers anyway, old or young. But also that's… if you're 20… I mean, come on, who wants to see a naked old person? And that's the market.

Dodsworth:Is that you're market, kids in their 20s?
Morris: They're all over the place. It's mixed but there's a certain demographic that spends the most money on certain things. It's not necessarily what I want to watch. I don't like contemporary, popular music very much but I never have. It's not like I’m now old and there's nothing like the Beatles were. I never really liked the Beatles that much. I mean for a minute I did, but it's never been a big interest of mine. It's not like I'm an old curmudgeon, it's just like I don't really spend the time doing things that I don't like to do very much.

Dodsworth:Bob Wills was once popular music.
Morris: Yeah, in the ’30s and ’40s. Absolutely. I like lots of popular music. I just don't like contemporary popular music. I like music from the ’20s. It's not a rule, it's just a preference. It's not like, 'oh, this is from the’50s therefore I don't like that.' I don't think that way at all. It's, 'oh. I like that song, what's that?' There are exceptions. But I don't buy that music. It's not interesting to me.

Dodsworth:What is the story behind your Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys dances?
Morris: I work with live music but this particular piece is one that's not. It's to recorded music because it's a particular recording session that I like. I could hire a cover band but this is them [Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys] very, very old. He died sort of the next day. This is from the early-middle ’70s, they'd been a band for 40 years. It's them… they're all very old on this recording. That's what I like. It's not a period recording from the ’30s. It's fantastic. If you listen to their music from the ’30s and the ’40s and then from the ’70s, they're relaxed and they don't have to pay any attention to each other and they know each other and they read each other's minds and they play fabulously and their rhythm is perfect and it's great. It's wonderful.

New CBO estimate says Public Plan lowers costs & covers more

2009-07-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a preliminary score of the health care legislation under consideration in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. The bill was estimated to cost $1 trillion over 10 years, while reducing the number of uninsured by "only" one-third. As many informed observers noted at the time, the cost estimate was incomplete because the legislation that the CBO reviewed did not contain language about a public health insurance plan or an employer mandate. Nevertheless, Republicans seized on the opportunity to engage in merciless political attacks, citing the incomplete CBO score as proof that health care reform is not worth doing: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said "the CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan," and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said "[the CBO estimate] should be a wake up call for all of us to scrap the current bill and start over in a true bipartisan fashion." But the proposal lacked a public health insurance option or an employer mandate, provisions that would drastically change the size, scope and estimate. Now the HELP committee has submitted a full bill -- and the result is drastically different. The "plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage." In addition, "the [employer mandate] provision is also estimated to greatly reduce the number of workers whose employers would drop coverage, thus addressing a major concern noted by CBO when it reviewed the earlier proposals." Additionally, the incoming president of the American Medical Association, Dr. J. James Rohack, said his organization now supports a public plan, after initially indicating its opposition, adding that the AMA supports an "American model" that includes both "a private system and a public system, working together."

Reasons to stop Single Payer Health Care!

2009-06-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

for Father's Day

2009-06-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Let him know you care, he won't always be there.

Bill Maher nails Obama

2009-06-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

Three very interesting views of the growing Right Wing fanatic threat facing our country

2009-06-10T18:34:00.001-07:00

Watch and tremble

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200906100041

http://tinyurl.com/moqsp5

http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/?id=2706277&ref=fpblg

2009-06-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

Fred Dodsworth sez my news junkie pals will enjoy this:
Now Wikipedia is the News! http://tinyurl.com/lbbw9e
Wikipedia Articles Appear in Google News Results
Google News has built a strong reputation on its ability to quickly find, sort and deliver news information and sources. It takes information from news...

Fred Dodsworth sez evolutionary science is just too much fun for normal folk. http://tinyurl.com/l4uceh

from my Twitter and Facebook accounts

Why California & the Newspaper biz is bankrupt

2009-06-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

This is a perfect example of why both the state of California and the news media are failing. This buried story should have been on the front page of every newspaper in California, but instead it was hidden deep inside the paper. The story was printed on page 7 of the Oakland Tribune, owned by MediaNews Group, (ie: Dean Singleton who is also CEO of Associated Press) one of the largest consolidated newspaper groups in America.

While Programs For Poor Get The Knife,
Corporations Prepare For Tax Windfall
By Steven Harmon, MediaNews Sacramento Bureau
Posted: 06/03/2009 01:02:05 PM PDT, Updated: 06/04/2009 05:55:55 AM PDT

SACRAMENTO — Corporate tax giveaways from dead-of-night budget agreements in September and February will cost the state as much as $2.5 billion in revenues at a time when lawmakers are contemplating eliminating programs for the poor, a budget analyst said Wednesday.

The tax loopholes made it through the Legislature with no public hearings and little analysis of the effect, said Jean Ross, executive director for the California Budget Project, a research group that studies the effects of policies on the poor.

"The problem with dark-of-night deals is that you never get a chance to get a debate over value choices," she said. "These three tax breaks represent a reduction of one-third the income taxes paid by California corporations.... They really represent a stark contrast in values and what kind of future we want to see for Californians."

The tax breaks will cost the state $640 million for the rest of this fiscal year and for the 2010-11 budget year as lawmakers search for ways to close a $24.3 billion deficit, according to Ross's report, "To Have and Have Not." By the time they are fully implemented in 2014-15, the tax breaks could cost nearly $2.5 billion a year, she said.

In marathon, private negotiations in February, Democratic leaders seeking support for a broad tax increase reached an agreement with Republican leaders to approve the single sales factor tax break, which allows multistate corporations to choose whether they want to be taxed solely for their sales in California rather than have their taxes based on property, payroll and sales in the state.

Schwarzenegger touts the single sales factor as a policy that will strengthen small businesses and keep jobs in California.

"There's never been a more important time to create an attractive employment climate in California so that businesses stay home and create jobs," said Aaron McLear, the governor's spokesman.

In a memo supporting the tax change, California Competes, a coalition of business, technology and education leaders, said that under the old three-factor formula, California created a "competitive disadvantage for companies with a significant presence in the state, burdening them with higher income taxes because of their property and payroll investments here."

The single sales factor, the memo said, spurs job creation by eliminating the tax penalty for increasing the number of employees on payroll.

A 2005 study contradicted those arguments. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit research institute in Washington, D.C., found that while most states have lost manufacturing jobs since 1995, states that went to the single sales tax formula did not fare much better.

Ross said the benefits are overwhelmingly concentrated among "a very few, very large corporations."

According to estimates prepared by the Franchise Tax Board, nine corporations will receive tax cuts averaging $33.1 million each in 2013-14 under the single sales factor. And 80 percent of the benefits will go to the largest corporations — those with gross receipts of more than $1 billion.

"One of the things so striking about the provisions is the benefits are overwhelmingly concentrated among a very few, very large corporations," she said.

Another tax loophole allows corporations that have maxed out on their tax credits to share them with a family of related corporations. Six corporations will receive tax cuts averaging $23.5 million each in 2013-14 under the credit sharing loophole.

The third loophole, called net operating loss carrybacks, allows corporations to claim refunds on taxes already paid.

Ross said these tax breaks at full implementation would be enough to pay for the entire cost of three programs Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to eliminate: CalWORKS, the welfare-to-work program; Healthy Families, the health insurance program for poor children; and cash assistance payments to low-income elderly and those with severe disabilities.

"The dollars we're talking about are significant," she said. "So, when we're talking two, three, five years from now about why California has budget problems, it'll be important to look at the revenues that have been given away by the Legislature at the depth of our budget crisis."

The report, which is based on analysis prepared by the California Franchise Tax Board completed in May, was handed over Wednesday to Democratic leaders of the legislative conference committee on budgets.

While the Franchise Tax Board is not authorized to release the names of taxpayers, Ross noted that a handful have aggressively pushed the single sales factor legislation in previous efforts, including Apple, Genentech, Paramount Theaters, Disney, Intel and Warner Brothers.

Repealing the loopholes would require a two-thirds vote because it would be considered a tax increase.

Reach Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101 or sharmon@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Tiny spheres of fear scare the Bushians.

2009-06-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

A jaunty tune for Yes on h8 supporters

2009-05-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

Senator Bribe-Us Baucus sells out U.S.

2009-05-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Shocking Doctrine that's killing U.S.

2009-05-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Extend immunosuppressive drug coverage for kidney transplant patients!

2009-05-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Help people with kidney transplants! Ask your Representative to co-sponsor HR 1458, legislation that would extend Medicare coverage of immunosuppressive drugs beyond the first 36 month after transplant. Since this alert was launched last week, 400 messages have been sent to Congress, and health care reform is building momentum, and we need you to act now by telling your Representative to act today.

This legislation is one of the key provisions in the NKF End the Wait! campaign. The bill will help transplant recipients maintain their kidney function, and will allow others to consider a transplant because they know the expensive drugs they need will be available without a time limitation.

Organ transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive drugs for the life of the transplant to help prevent the body from rejecting the organ. Currently, Medicare pays for most kidney transplants but covers drugs for only 36 months post-transplant as part of the Medicare ESRD benefit. After that, kidney recipients must pay for immunosuppressive drugs through private insurance, public or pharmaceutical programs or pay out-of-pocket. (Medicare covers drugs without a time limit if the patient qualifies because of age or disability status.)

Immunosuppressive drugs are expensive, but the alternative is even more costly.

A kidney transplant recipient costs Medicare $17,000 annually. If the kidney transplant fails, the person returns to dialysis at which point, Medicare spends an average of $71,000 per year on a dialysis patient. And quality of life often suffers too.

Please take a moment to write your Representative today and ask him or her to co-sponsor HR 1458. Share your story, or the story of a loved one, about the experience with immunosuppressive drug coverage.

More info can be found at Kidney Foundation's End the Wait! http://www.kidney.org/news/end_the_wait/recommendations.cfm

News is dying 'cuz reporters & editors are crap mongers

2009-05-08T00:22:00.002-07:00

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances. -- By Walter Pincus in the Columbia Journalism Review.

read it all here.
http://www.cjr.org/essay/newspaper_narcissism_1.php?page=all

War 'tween boys & girls -- femme it!

2009-05-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

This is even better if you double click it to make two videos play at once! Very tasty echo effect.

Books are dead, long live Books!

2009-05-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Books are dead, long live Books! Publishing-wise, I believe we're going forwards (four-words?) into the future by heading rapidly into the past. It's going to be Small Press Realities vs MegaCorp McCrap Books Unlimited, and who gives a shit about 'Beach Books' anyways? Like locavores, we'll be reading esoteric art press books by folks we love, from our own little personal worlds from all over the real world.
In the future, like in the past, a 'library', full of excellent, well-handled tomes, will be cherished, special and small, not walls of books we'll never read that fill so many rooms today.
Whether it's the Expresso/Barista Publishing Gizmo,
or Electro-On-Line-Kinda-Kindlie,
or Set-It-Yourself Type in the Basement Bookies,
Books aren't dead.
Books live forever!

News, too.

It's time for Texas to go!

2009-04-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

Reports of the death of newsprint are greatly exaggerated

2009-04-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

When it comes to profits, local beats sexy
If you believe print is doomed, the opinion of investment banker Jonathan Knee might surprise you. What follows are some quotes from Knee that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. He's an investment banker who advised on the San Diego Union-Tribune deal and who has covered the media industry for over 15 years. Knee is the director of the media program at the Columbia Business School and the co-author of “Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies?”, which is to be published by Portfolio Books this year.

"The reason why most newspaper companies have gone bankrupt or appear perilously close to it is that they have too much debt, not that they have stopped being profitable. ... [C]ompared to most media businesses like movies and books, most newspapers still have higher profit margins ...

"There is widespread confusion ... regarding the source of the shocking historic profitability of many newspapers. The most profitable newspapers have tended to be monopoly markets with circulation of 20,000 to 100,000 readers. These are not sexy papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have historically have significantly low margins.

"Major market papers typically have suffered from the greatest anachronisms in their cost structure due to everything from oppressive union work rules to just bad management.

"When the smoke clears, the local newspaper, which may not be the sexiest part of the newspaper industry but is overwhelmingly the largest and most profitable part of the industry, will be a smaller and more-focused enterprise whose activities will be directed to those areas where their local presence gives them competitive advantage and they will continue to generate as a result better profits than the supersexy businesses in the media industry asking for government or nonprofit help like movies and music."

--this brief was borrowed from the SF/Pen Press Club, March 31 edition.

Banks walking away from foreclosures!!

2009-03-30T14:56:00.000-07:00

borrowed from the New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY, Published: March 29, 2009

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Mercy James thought she had lost her rental property here to foreclosure. A date for a sheriff’s sale had been set, and notices about the foreclosure process were piling up in her mailbox.

Ms. James had the tenants move out, and soon her white house at the corner of Thomas and Maple Streets fell into the hands of looters and vandals, and then, into disrepair. Dejected and broke, Ms. James said she salvaged but a lesson from her loss.

So imagine her surprise when the City of South Bend contacted her recently, demanding that she resume maintenance on the property. The sheriff’s sale had been canceled at the last minute, leaving the property title — and a world of trouble — in her name.

“I thought, ‘What kind of game is this?’ ” Ms. James, 41, said while picking at trash at the house, now so worthless the city plans to demolish it — another bill for which she will be liable.

City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

In Ms. James’s case, the company that was most recently servicing her loan is now defunct. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy and dissolved. And the original bank that sold her the loan said it could not find a record of it.

“It is what some of us think is the next wave of the crisis,” said Kermit Lind, a clinical professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert on foreclosure law.

For older industrial cities like South Bend, hard times in the mortgage market began before the recent national downturn, as did the problem of bank walkaways. In the case of Ms. James, a home health care administrator, the foreclosure proceedings began in the summer of 2007, when she could not keep up with the adjustable rate on her mortgage.

In Buffalo, where officials said the problem had reached “epidemic” proportions in recent months, the city sued 37 banks last year, claiming they were responsible for the deterioration of at least 57 abandoned homes; the city chose a sampling of houses to include in the lawsuit, even though the banks had walked away from many more foreclosures. So far, five banks have settled.

In Kansas City, Rachel Foley, a lawyer who handles housing cases, said bank walkaways were “a rare occurrence two to three years ago.”

“We’re seeing them dumped more and more at the moment,” she said.

Experts suggest the bank walkaways are most visible in states where foreclosures are processed through the courts and therefore tend to be more transparent. Other states, like Indiana and New York, have court-mandated foreclosures, but roughly half of the states allow foreclosures to proceed without court intervention, making it difficult to accurately count the number of bank walkaways in recent months.

The soft housing market and the vandalism that often occurs when a house sits empty are the two main factors influencing the mortgage holders’ decisions to walk away, said Larry Rothenberg, a lawyer for Weltman, Weinberg & Reis, one of the larger creditors’ rights firms in the country.

“Oftentimes when the foreclosure starts out, it’s a viable property,” Mr. Rothenberg said, “but by the time it gets to a sheriff’s sale, it might not have enough value to justify further expense. We’ve always had cases where property was vandalized or lost value, but they were rare compared to these times.”

The problem seems most acute at the bottom of the market — houses that were inexpensive to begin with — and with investment properties, where investors and banks want speedy closure by writing off bad loans as losses. Banks and investors typically lose 40 percent to 50 percent of their investment on every foreclosure.

Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry newsletter, said some properties had become such liabilities for investors that it was not even worth holding on to them to strip valuable fixtures, like kitchen appliances, toilets and hardware.

“The whole purpose of foreclosure is to take title of the property, sell it and recoup what money you can,” Mr. Cecala said. “It’s just a sign of the times that things are so bad no one wants to take possession of the property.”

In South Bend, boarded-up houses for whom no one has stepped forward are dotting the landscape, adding a fresh layer of blight to communities that were already scarred from the area’s industrial decline.

The city is hoping to create a new type of legal mediation process that would bring together the homeowners and the mortgage holders to settle their disputes while allowing the owners to remain in the home — considered crucial to any stabilization effort.

“I’d say in the last three or four months, we’ve seen dozens of these cases,” said Chuck Leone, the South Bend city attorney. “We see it one of two ways. One is that the bank will simply dismiss the foreclosure complaint. The other is that the mortgage holder will follow through and take a judgment of foreclosure, but then not schedule the property for sheriff’s sale.”

In Ms. James’s case, it has been impossible to determine who canceled the sheriff’s sale, since her last mortgage holder went out of business. Even the city clerk’s records did not provide an answer.

“Nobody has any idea who owns what or who’s responsible,” said Judy Fox, Ms. James’s lawyer at the Notre Dame Legal Aid Clinic. “It’s a very common story.”

Mayor Stephen J. Luecke of South Bend added: “It’s just a crime the way it puts people in limbo. They first off have gone through the grief of losing their house, then they move out and find out that they still own it and have responsibility for it.”

In Jacksonville, Fla., Sylvester Kimbrough Jr. found himself caught in the limbo between foreclosure and ownership last year, 10 years into his 30-year mortgage on a $42,000 two-bedroom house.

Mr. Kimbrough, 56, a former driver for a car dealership who is now unemployed, had already moved out when he learned that the foreclosure had been stopped.

“That move really almost destroyed us,” Mr. Kimbrough said. “It was all for nothing.”

America's disgraceful criminal justice system

2009-03-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

"America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace," said Senator Webb. "With five percent of the world's population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence. There is great appreciation from most in this country that we are doing something drastically wrong. And, I am gratified that Senator Specter has joined me as the lead Republican cosponsor of this effort. We are committed to getting this legislation passed and enacted into law this year."

Those are Sen. Jim Webb's (D-VA) words on introducing the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009.

WEBB, SPECTER INTRODUCE BILL TO OVERHAUL AMERICA'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: Blue-Ribbon Commission to Offer Reforms on Incarceration Rates, Sentencing Policies, Gang Violence, Prison Administration & Reintegration of Offenders

Washington, DC--Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) today (March 26, 2009) introduced bipartisan legislation to create a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation's entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, is the principal Republican cosponsor.

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, S.714, is the result of decades of investigation and more than two years of intensive fact-finding in the U.S. Senate. In the 110th Congress, Webb chaired two hearings of the Joint Economic Committee that examined various aspects of the criminal justice system. In October of 2008, he conducted a symposium on drugs in America at George Mason University Law Center.

[For a copy of the legislation, visit: http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html

"There have been many commissions in recent years, but the problems which we are now confronting warrant a fresh look," Senator Specter said. "This commission has the potential to really make some very significant advances in public security and protection from the violent criminals. I look forward to working with Senator Webb and my colleagues in the Senate on this important legislation."

The high-level commission created by the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 legislation will be comprised of experts in fields including criminal justice, law enforcement, public heath, national security, prison administration, social services, prisoner reentry, and victims' rights. It will be led by a chairperson to be appointed by the President. The Majority and Minority Leaders in the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations will appoint the remaining members of the commission.

Commissioners will be tasked with proposing tangible, wide-ranging reforms designed to responsibly reduce the overall incarceration rate; improve federal and local responses to international and domestic gang violence; restructure our approach to drug criminalization; improve the treatment of mental illness; improve prison administration; and establish a system for reintegrating ex-offenders.

In addition to Senators Webb and Specter, original cosponsors of the legislation include: Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Crime and Drugs Subcommittee Chairman Richard Durbin (D-IL), Crime and Drugs Subcommittee Ranking Member Lindsay Graham (R-SC), and Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Patty Murray (D-WA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA), Roland Burris (D-IL), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

Webb said that he has also had encouraging discussions about the bill with officials from the White House and Department of Justice.

Senator Webb's interest in reforming the U.S. criminal justice system stems from his days as a Marine Corps officer, sitting on courts-martial, and "thinking about the interrelationship between discipline and fairness." Later, as an attorney, he spent six years in pro bono representation of a young African American Marine accused of war crimes in Vietnam, eventually clearing the man's name three years after he took his own life.

Twenty-five years ago, while working on special assignment for Parade Magazine, Webb was the first American journalist allowed inside the Japanese prison system, where he "became aware of the systemic dysfunctions of the U.S. system." Japan, with half of the United States' population at that time, had only 40,000 sentenced prisoners in jail compared to the U.S.'s 580,000; today, the U.S. has 2.38 million prisoners and another five million involved in the process, either due to probation or parole situations.

"We are not protecting our citizens from the increasing danger of criminals who perpetrate violence and intimidation as a way of life, and we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail," concluded Webb. "I believe that American ingenuity can discover better ways to deal with the problems of drugs and nonviolent criminal behavior while still minimizing violent crime and large-scale gang activity.

"We all deserve to live in a country made better by such changes," said Webb.

This statement was provided by the office of Senator Jim Webb.

Failed states & failed policies: Stop the failed drug wars

2009-03-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

From The Economist print edition Mar 5th 2009

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago. Reviewing the evidence again, prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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2009-03-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

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bust you up some connivers and plotters and even folks who are just saying bad things about you!

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More Republican Family Values

2009-03-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

Easy like Sunday morning?
Well, not for Gary Skoien, the former chairman of the Cook County, Illinois GOP. A police report alleges that after his wife caught Skoien with two prostitutes in the children's playroom Sunday morning, he had her arrested on domestic violence charges. Skoien says that his wife, a 5-foot-4, 110 pound 36 year-old, beat him with her fists and an electric guitar. "I called the police because I thought I was going to be killed," he said in the police report. Skoien says that he was with "a friend," and that he will sue to separate his wife from any contact with him or their three children.
(Chicago Sun Times via TPM Muckraker)

Chicago Sun Times
March 11, 2009 by ABDON M. PALLASCH & DAN ROZEK Staff Reporters

Inverness Police say former Cook County Republican Chairman Gary Skoien admitted having two prostitutes in his children’s playroom when his wife walked in on him early Sunday morning.

The allegation is in a domestic battery report from Skoien, 55, against his 36-year-old, 5-foot-4-inch, 110-pound wife. He said she beat him with her fists and an electric guitar.

But Skoien said the police report inaccurately stated that he had prostitutes in his home. Skoien said he and a friend were talking in the playroom when his wife came down and began beating him.

Eni Skoien spent two nights in a lock-up before being released on a $10,000 personal recognizance bond.

The police report said Skoien had cuts and blood on his hands and there was blood on the walls and stairs near the playroom.

The police report said Skoien “told [the responding officer] he did in fact have prostitutes with him in the playroom when his wife caught him.” The playroom looked like “a struggle of some kind took place there...There were items turned and tossed around the room,” the report said.

“That’s how it was reported to us,” Barrington/Inverness Police Deputy Chief Jerry Libit said.

Allies of Mayor Daley blasted Skoien four years ago when he offered a $10,000 “bounty” four years ago for information that would lead to Daley’s conviction on corruption charges.

The remark got Skoien fired from his real estate job, cost him a seat on the Metra board and prompted calls for his ouster as party chairman, He survived a re-election vote, serving from 2004-2007 as chairman of the GOP, which has not elected a member countywide in 17 years.

Current Republican Party Chairman Lee Roupas said, “It’s an extremely disappointing and unfortunate situation, if the allegations prove to be true.”

Skoien was an aide to former Gov. Jim Thompson and serves as Palatine Township Republican Committeeman.

He said he and his wife of 13 years have been living in separate sections of the house for a while and getting counseling but that he went to police after she hit him last Tuesday while he was brushing his teeth.

“I went to the police to find out what I should be doing,” he said.

On Sunday night, he said his wife was driven home from a function and she went to bed. Skoien called a friend who came over and they were talking in the playroom when his wife woke up and began beating him with her fists and “a hard heavy electric guitar,” he said.

“I called police because I thought I was going to be killed,” Skoien said.

Skoien went to talk to the arresting officers Wednesday after his stories hit the news, trying to convince them that he did not confirm his wife’s contention that she found him with prostitutes.

“If there were hookers, I’m not sure why the police didn’t arrest me -- that’s illegal too,” Skoien said.

He said the officer stuck to his contention that Skoien nodded in affirmance when told his wife’s version of events. Skoien said he disagrees.

Skoien obtained an order of protection that prohibits his wife from having any contact with him or their three children, ages 5, 7 and 8, he said.

We Are Breeding Ourselves to Extinction

2009-03-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

By Chris Hedges
March 09, 2009 "Truthdig"

All measures to thwart the degradation and destruction of our ecosystem will be useless if we do not cut population growth. By 2050, if we continue to reproduce at the current rate, the planet will have between 8 billion and 10 billion people, according to a recent U.N. forecast. This is a 50 percent increase. And yet government-commissioned reviews, such as the Stern report in Britain, do not mention the word population. Books and documentaries that deal with the climate crisis, including Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," fail to discuss the danger of population growth. This omission is odd, given that a doubling in population, even if we cut back on the use of fossil fuels, shut down all our coal-burning power plants and build seas of wind turbines, will plunge us into an age of extinction and desolation unseen since the end of the Mesozoic era, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.

We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet's life-forms-an estimated 8,760 species die off per year-because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The Yangtze River dolphin, Atlantic gray whale, West African black rhino, Merriam's elk, California grizzly bear, silver trout, blue pike and dusky seaside sparrow are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E.O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the Cenozoic, the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic-the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from born-again Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland.

The populations in industrialized nations maintain their lifestyles because they have the military and economic power to consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The United States alone gobbles up about 25 percent of the oil produced in the world each year. These nations view their stable or even zero growth birthrates as sufficient. It has been left to developing countries to cope with the emergent population crisis. India, Egypt, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Cuba and China, whose one-child policy has prevented the addition of 400 million people, have all tried to institute population control measures. But on most of the planet, population growth is exploding. The U.N. estimates that 200 million women worldwide do not have access to contraception. The population of the Persian Gulf states, along with the Israeli-occupied territories, will double in two decades, a rise that will ominously coincide with precipitous peak oil declines.

The overpopulated regions of the globe will ravage their local environments, cutting down rainforests and the few remaining wilderness areas, in a desperate bid to grow food. And the depletion and destruction of resources will eventually create an overpopulation problem in industrialized nations as well. The resources that industrialized nations consider their birthright will become harder and more expensive to obtain. Rising water levels on coastlines, which may submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, will disrupt agriculture and displace millions, who will attempt to flee to areas on the planet where life is still possible. The rising temperatures and droughts have already begun to destroy crop lands in Africa, Australia, Texas and California. The effects of this devastation will first be felt in places like Bangladesh, but will soon spread within our borders. Footprint data suggests that, based on current lifestyles, the sustainable population of the United Kingdom-the number of people the country could feed, fuel and support from its own biological capacity-is about 18 million. This means that in an age of extreme scarcity, some 43 million people in Great Britain would not be able to survive. Overpopulation will become a serious threat to the viability of many industrialized states the instant the cheap consumption of the world's resources can no longer be maintained. This moment may be closer than we think.

A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.

James Lovelock, an independent British scientist who has spent most of his career locked out of the mainstream, warned several decades ago that disrupting the delicate balance of the Earth, which he refers to as a living body, would be a form of collective suicide. The atmosphere on Earth-21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen-is not common among planets, he notes. These gases are generated, and maintained at an equable level for life's processes, by living organisms themselves. Oxygen and nitrogen would disappear if the biosphere was destroyed. The result would be a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Venus, a planet that is consequently hundreds of degrees hotter than Earth. Lovelock argues that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and soil are living entities. They constitute, he says, a self-regulating system. Lovelock, in support of this thesis, looked at the cycle in which algae in the oceans produce volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds act as seeds to form oceanic clouds. Without these dimethyl sulfide "seeds" the cooling oceanic clouds would be lost. This self-regulating system is remarkable because it maintains favorable conditions for human life. Its destruction would not mean the death of the planet. It would not mean the death of life-forms. But it would mean the death of Homo sapiens.

Lovelock advocates nuclear power and thermal solar power; the latter, he says, can be produced by huge mirrors mounted in deserts such as those in Arizona and the Sahara. He proposes reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide with large plastic cylinders thrust vertically into the ocean. These, he says, could bring nutrient-rich lower waters to the surface, producing an algal bloom that would increase the cloud cover. But he warns that these steps will be ineffective if we do not first control population growth. He believes the Earth is overpopulated by a factor of about seven. As the planet overheats-and he believes we can do nothing to halt this process-overpopulation will make all efforts to save the ecosystem futile.

Lovelock, in "The Revenge of Gaia," said that if we do not radically and immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions, the human race might not die out but it would be reduced to "a few breeding pairs." "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," his latest book, which has for its subtitle "The Final Warning," paints an even grimmer picture. Lovelock says a continued population boom will make the reduction of fossil fuel use impossible. If we do not reduce our emissions by 60 percent, something that can be achieved only by walking away from fossil fuels, the human race is doomed, he argues. Time is running out. This reduction will never take place, he says, unless we can dramatically reduce our birthrate.

All efforts to stanch the effects of climate change are not going to work if we do not practice vigorous population control. Overpopulation, in times of hardship, will create as much havoc in industrialized nations as in the impoverished slums around the globe where people struggle on less than two dollars a day. Population growth is often overlooked, or at best considered a secondary issue, by many environmentalists, but it is as fundamental to our survival as reducing the emissions that are melting the polar ice caps.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America."

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Once again the Fourth Estate FAILS to pass the test!!!

2009-03-05T09:55:00.000-08:00

Typical of the modern press, the KEY POINT made in this analysis of modern journalism's failures, isn't made until the 9th graf of an 11 graf story!!!!

"Poor press performance could be contributing to the public’s disinterest in news. A Zogby poll at the end of 2008 reported 73 percent of Americans think news coverage is biased. .... A Harris poll last year reported that two-thirds of Americans think journalism is out of touch with the citizenry."

WTF!!!! Even a story about journalism's failures, screws up the story!!!
Every journalist, and every journalism student knows that only the most devoted readers will get past the first few grafs.

Here's the whole editorial, by Jeffery McCall, as it ran in the March 5th edition of the Atlanta Constitution Journal, a respected daily newspaper.

As press dies, say R.I.P. to an informed citizenry

By JEFFREY M. McCALL
Professor of communications
at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Constitutional framer James Madison knew the importance of an informed citizenry. He and his close ally, Thomas Jefferson, also knew it would take a free press to ensure citizens’ access to the information needed for self-governance. The First Amendment provided the framework for that free flow of information. “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people,” Madison said.

Madison would surely be disappointed by what is happening across the press landscape today. News organizations, print and broadcast, are paring back services and laying off reporters. The citizenry is not holding up its end, either. Newspaper readership is down, along with viewership numbers for network television news broadcasts. A recent Pew Research Center study revealed disappointing results about Americans’ awareness of current news. None of this is good for a nation that needs informed citizens to govern themselves.

The Pew study asked citizens 10 multiple-choice questions about recent public affairs matters. The questions were simple. Which party has a majority in Congress? What is Hillary Clinton’s Cabinet position? The average American got only six out of 10 answers correct. Adults 18-29 averaged fewer than five correct.

Young adults today are generally not news consumers, a change from young adults a generation ago. The concern is that non-news consumers today will stay that way. France is addressing this problem by providing a free daily newspaper to each 18-year-old. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said earlier this year, “The habit of reading the press takes hold at a very young age.”

A Pew Research Center study shows television is still the public’s main source for national and international news, but the Internet is now in second place, surpassing newspapers. For young adults, however, the study shows the Internet and television are even.

The Internet, however, for all of its potential as a democratizing source of news, is apparently not fulfilling its promise. The issue, of course, is the content that Internet users actually read and view once they are on the Internet. Internet users might well think they are being enlightened simply because they are on the Net. However, if they are getting their “news” from blogs, social sites or highly partisan outlets, they are not being well-informed.

Internet news consumers serve essentially as their own editors, often going only to those sites that serve narrow content or partisan interests. Obviously, people can check out whatever they want, but they need to know they might be engaging in what media theorists call information segregation. It is likely that many people who rely on the Internet for news actually become expertly informed on celebrity gossip, NBA statistics, funny animal videos or conservative/liberal spin.

President Barack Obama helped legitimize the Internet information world by calling on a Huffington Post reporter at his recent news conference, bypassing reporters from many traditional outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

Poor press performance could be contributing to the public’s disinterest in news. A Zogby poll at the end of 2008 reported 73 percent of Americans think news coverage is biased. Three-fourths of Americans think media coverage influenced the presidential election results, a figure that naturally includes many Obama voters. A Harris poll last year reported that two-thirds of Americans think journalism is out of touch with the citizenry.

The television coverage of the financial stimulus plan left Americans grossly underserved. A study by the left-leaning Media Matters watchdog showed only 6 percent of all guests analyzing the stimulus plan on cable and network news interview programs were economists, leaving the debate to partisan hacks and mouthpieces who yelled about the politics of the matter and not the economics.

The right-leaning Media Research Center found the same inept coverage pattern in its analysis of network evening news programs. Only 13 percent of the people interviewed about the economic recovery were economists. Americans deserve more information and less political emotion about a story as important as this. Emotion is easy for television to generate. Informed reporting is more difficult.

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Political Humor
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...from the mind of a child

2009-03-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

In pictures: Child drawings of Darfur
The International Criminal Court is accepting supporting evidence of children's drawings of the alleged crimes committed in Darfur. This sketch by Abdul Maggit depicts a typical scene of destruction. BBC News, 13:16 GMT, Wednesday, 4 March 2009

from the mouth of a child

2009-03-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

Hymn to the end

2009-03-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

I am a weapon of massive consumption

2009-03-01T19:26:00.000-08:00

Conservative Families Value Porn

2009-02-28T16:32:00.000-08:00

Porn in the USA:
Conservatives are online porn's biggest consumers

February 27, 2009
by Ewen Callaway

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

Political divide

Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.

That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.

After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favored Barack Obama.

Old-fashioned values

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior."

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

Journal reference: Journal of Economic Perspectives vol 23, p 209

First Kisses

2009-02-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

First kisses tell a lot
Feb. 14, 2009 at 1:52 AM CHICAGO, Feb. 14 (UPI)
A U.S. researcher says the sweet first kisses of courtship may provide important information on mating to both men and women.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said for men the kisses appear to provide data on a woman's estrogen level, The Daily Mail reported. That would let them know where the woman is in the fertility cycle.

"Men like sloppier kisses," she said.

Women, on the other hand, may be getting unconscious information on whether a potential partner has an immune system different from theirs. Marrying someone with complementary immunity could lead to healthier offspring with a broad range of disease resistance.

Fisher reported on her research at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

"I think that is just the beginning of what we are going to find out," she said. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. We are going to find many other mechanisms we unconsciously use to size up a person's biological traits."

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

One in nine houses vacant

2009-02-13T13:32:00.001-08:00

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY
A record 1 in 9 U.S. homes are vacant, a glut created by the housing boom and subsequent collapse.

"The numbers are further documentation of the gravity of the housing problem," says Nicolas Retsinas, head of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "This inventory is delaying any kind of housing recovery."

The surge in empty houses, condominiums and apartments is creating a wave of problems for communities desperate to shore up property values and tax revenues that pay for services. Vacant homes create upkeep and safety problems that ripple through neighborhoods.

"It has a contagion effect," Retsinas says. "A house that is vacant is often a house that is less well kept up."

A construction frenzy began pushing the vacancy rate up in 2005 but empty homes sold quickly at that time.

"This is a different problem," says Dowell Myers, housing demographer at the University of Southern California. "It's high now because of lack of demand. Now, vacancies we see are from units that have been empty for a period of time."

Census numbers show:

• More than 14 million housing units are vacant. That number does not include an estimated 4.8 million seasonal or vacation homes, most of which are occupied part of the year. The combined vacancy rate of almost 15% is higher than during previous recessions: 11% in 1991 and 9.4% in 1984.

• About 3% of owned homes are vacant. In normal times, "maybe 1% should be vacant," Myers says.

• More than 9% of homes built since 2000 are vacant compared with about 2% for older homes.

• Homes priced at $500,000 or more are just as likely to be empty as homes that cost less than $100,000.

Historically, vacant housing was more of a concern in cities that have poor neighborhoods. Now, it has hit suburbs and new subdivisions.

"You have abandoned vacant housing in Detroit but you also have it in Henderson, Nev., and Mesa, Ariz. (suburbs of Las Vegas and Phoenix)," Retsinas says.

The stimulus bill before Congress contains $2 billion to help communities buy and fix foreclosed, vacant properties.

One place hit hard is Rialto, Calif., an inland town that boomed by offering shelter from astronomical housing prices in coastal Southern California. Property values have dropped 50% since 2007. In a 40-unit development, only four are occupied, says John Dutrey, housing program manager. Vacant homes, he says, bring "squatters, you have maintenance issues, security issues."

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-02-12-vacancy12_N.htm

One in nine houses vacant

2009-02-13T13:32:00.000-08:00

By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY
A record 1 in 9 U.S. homes are vacant, a glut created by the housing boom and subsequent collapse.

"The numbers are further documentation of the gravity of the housing problem," says Nicolas Retsinas, head of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. "This inventory is delaying any kind of housing recovery."

The surge in empty houses, condominiums and apartments is creating a wave of problems for communities desperate to shore up property values and tax revenues that pay for services. Vacant homes create upkeep and safety problems that ripple through neighborhoods.

"It has a contagion effect," Retsinas says. "A house that is vacant is often a house that is less well kept up."

A construction frenzy began pushing the vacancy rate up in 2005 but empty homes sold quickly at that time.

"This is a different problem," says Dowell Myers, housing demographer at the University of Southern California. "It's high now because of lack of demand. Now, vacancies we see are from units that have been empty for a period of time."

Census numbers show:

• More than 14 million housing units are vacant. That number does not include an estimated 4.8 million seasonal or vacation homes, most of which are occupied part of the year. The combined vacancy rate of almost 15% is higher than during previous recessions: 11% in 1991 and 9.4% in 1984.

• About 3% of owned homes are vacant. In normal times, "maybe 1% should be vacant," Myers says.

• More than 9% of homes built since 2000 are vacant compared with about 2% for older homes.

• Homes priced at $500,000 or more are just as likely to be empty as homes that cost less than $100,000.

Historically, vacant housing was more of a concern in cities that have poor neighborhoods. Now, it has hit suburbs and new subdivisions.

"You have abandoned vacant housing in Detroit but you also have it in Henderson, Nev., and Mesa, Ariz. (suburbs of Las Vegas and Phoenix)," Retsinas says.

The stimulus bill before Congress contains $2 billion to help communities buy and fix foreclosed, vacant properties.

One place hit hard is Rialto, Calif., an inland town that boomed by offering shelter from astronomical housing prices in coastal Southern California. Property values have dropped 50% since 2007. In a 40-unit development, only four are occupied, says John Dutrey, housing program manager. Vacant homes, he says, bring "squatters, you have maintenance issues, security issues."

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-02-12-vacancy12_N.htm

Holy Sh*t! Watch this to see what's really happening to the Economy

2009-02-10T14:51:00.001-08:00

How bad is it?

2009-02-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

Actual job losses to date, these are not projections.*

This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession -- showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been. Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

*Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A thing of pure beauty...

2009-01-22T08:50:00.000-08:00

Alone and Naked, again

2009-01-17T13:07:00.001-08:00

Twinkle Twinkle

2009-01-09T10:15:00.001-08:00

Porn Bail Out -- an idea who time has cum ;-}

2009-01-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.

“The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,” said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. “The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.”

Francis said in a statement that “the US government should actively support the adult industry's survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people."

“We should be delivering [the request] by the end of today to our congressmen and [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Paulson asking for this $5 billion dollar bailout,” he told CNN Wednesday.

Flynt and Francis concede the industry itself is in no financial danger — DVD sales have slipped over the past year, but Web traffic has continued to grow.

But the industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. "People are too depressed to be sexually active," Flynt said in the statement. "This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex."

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It's time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly."

So far, there has been no congressional reaction to the request.

Larry Flynt, American patriot and hero

(here's a reach-around, thank you tug to CNN, from hence this came!)

Jobless Rate at 11%, Long Housing Slump?

2009-01-06T11:55:00.000-08:00

stolen from the Wall Street Journal's economic blog

Economists Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard and Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland have a particularly grim view of the economic outlook.

In a fascinating new paper that Mr. Rogoff presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, they offered some sobering details on what has happened to other countries in the aftermath of severe financial panics like the one the U.S. is now experiencing.

Their bottom line: If history is any guide, the housing market might not bottom until 2010, a stock market rebound isn’t in sight, the unemployment rate could exceed 11% and government debt is about to soar.

The work is an extension of long-running research by the two professors on the history of financial crises. In past work, they compared the U.S. situation to financial crises in developed countries. This time, they are adding in the experiences of developing after concluding that severe emerging-market crises aren’t all that different from crises in developed markets.

The paper is refreshing because it’s straightforward — it isn’t overloaded with Greek formulas and questionable regressions. Instead, they look at what happened to 22 economies ranging from Indonesia in 1997 to the U.S. in 1929 after a major crisis. (Most of the countries are from the past quarter century, though strangely, they lump in Norway from 1899.)

They find that unemployment rises by 7 percentage points on average after a severe financial crisis and doesn’t peak until four years after the crisis. The jobless right bottomed at 4.4% last year. If history is a guide, it could rise above 11% by 2011.

They find that housing downturns last six years — meaning a recovery is still about three years away. Moreover, stock-price declines last three and a half years and total 55%. That would put the Dow Jones Industrial Average below 6500 before this is done. Moreover, government debt reaches 86% of gross domestic product –- or $12 trillion. This last data point on government debt is particularly sobering. Despite all of the hope that policy makers are putting on fiscal stimulus, it’s not like it hasn’t been tried before.

Of course, this paper comes with all kinds of caveats. The U.S. is different in many ways from the emerging markets that suffered from crises in the past decade. For one, the U.S. borrows in its own currency, so it is not likely to suffer the kind of currency shock that they faced. And policy makers have learned from actions that others have taken in the past. The Fed, for instance, has been much more aggressive about attacking this problem than the central bank was in the Great Depression.

But as the professors argue, “one would be wise not to push too far the conceit that we are smarter than our predecessors.” — Jon Hilsenrath

Good Building, Bad Building

2008-12-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

China has opened a new subway system every year for the past six years. The U.S. has opened 45 new prisons and jails. Who's setting up to lead in the 21st century? We need to distinguish between building for the future and building for the past. by Eric Lotke

China has opened a new subway system every year for the past six years. The U.S. has opened 45 new prisons and jails. Who’s setting up to lead in the 21st century?

“Expanding prisons mean more jobs,” explained the Fayetteville Observer over the summer.

The rural North Carolina community was celebrating the $19 million expansion of a $90 million prison that opened in 2003 and immediately filled to capacity. Such growth is a boon for rural, economically distressed counties. “Prison jobs bring added payroll, boost housing markets and draw new retail customers to poor parts of the state,” observed the Observer.

The good news is that public investment can work. The bad news is that better choices must be made. We need to distinguish between prisons for crime control and prisons as a jobs program, between building for the future and building for the past.

* "We're always looking for ways to bring jobs to Wilkes County," said state senator Jim Whitehead of Georgia, when funding fell into place for a new pre-release center.
* “This is the biggest thing to happen to Stewart County since I’ve been here,” said the chair of the county board when the private, for-profit Corrections Corporation of America opened a new 1,524 person detention center. “Everything’s been leaving rather than coming in the 10 years I’ve been here. The biggest thing this will do is provide jobs for the county and the area.”
* Push state to build prison here,” editorialized the Altoona Mirror in central Pennsylvania, three weeks before the election. “What would the area do to obtain 600 well-paying jobs in what could be termed a recession-proof industry? It's not a rhetorical question. Those jobs could happen. But it's important that our local and state leaders don't drop the ball.”

President-elect Barack Obama is planning a massive new public works program. He wants to employ 2.5 million people rebuilding our roads and schools and bridges. That’s great. It’s more than great. We need the projects, we need the jobs, and the proposal is on the order of magnitude of the problem.

Part of the program could be a reconsideration of the role prisons play in our rural economy. That role seems to have taken on a life of its own.

“When folks here heard the governor wanted to close the 137-year-old Pontiac Correctional Center, sucking hundreds of jobs from the area, they mobilized in a way that only small towns can. They held rallies and a parade. Streets were lined with blue-and-white 'Save Our Prison' signs and residents were outfitted in T-shirts to match.” The local ABC news affiliate described it as “a struggle for their economic lives,” as the state considered closing the town's second-largest employer to help fill a $700 million hole in the state budget.

States are truly struggling. Forty-one states have already reported budget problems for the current or upcoming fiscal year, and it’s likely to get worse. States are starting to cut benefits and services ranging from health care to public schools and early childhood education.

But one budget item is never questioned: prisons.

Even as states spend nearly $50 billion on prisons every year and counties spend over $20 billion on jails, we build additional locked capacity. Even with U.S. incarceration rates at seven times historical and international norms, we build. Even as crime continues on its 15-year descent to levels not seen in 40 years, we find money to build even more.

The sacrifices we make to build these prisons are astonishing. Between 1987 and 2007, state spending on prisons increased by 40 percent (as a percent of the general fund). State spending on higher education decreased by 30 percent. We are financing our prisons by cutting our colleges.

We continue to build even though prisons are often disappointing for economic development. The best jobs go to people from out of town, and dollars spent on prisons have little “multiplier” effect. They don’t generate future additional dollars of economic activity, as do dollars spent on transportation, schools and so forth. Every dollar invested in highway construction generates $2.50 of gross domestic product in the short term. Raising teacher wages by 10 percent is associated with a 5 percent decrease in drop-out rates. But still we shortchange our schools and other rural enterprise, and build new prisons.

The solution is to recognize that prisons have an economic logic of their own. The Pentagon budget is understood as a combination of military necessity and commercial interests. We need to understand the appeal prisons offer to struggling rural communities in the same way.

The challenge is to break the link between prison as industry and prison as crime control. The challenge is to show a way out for governors and legislators who want to reduce the burden of the corrections budget but genuinely cannot because of the immediate and legitimate trouble it causes to their constituencies.

HERE'S HOW: As our new federal leaders develop plans for stimulus and infrastructure investment, they should self-consciously direct resources to break the link between prisons and the dependent rural economies. They should create a grant program to help states transition from prison economies to more productive uses.

People are ready for this kind of change. Way back in 1999, when there were half a million fewer people in American prisons and jails, John DiIulio, one of the main movers behind the prison explosion, said we had reached a point of diminishing returns. But we can’t change course; the transition costs are too high:

* Drug treatment and prevention programs are cheaper in the long run, but they cost money up front to start.
* Cost savings to some are job losses to others. Especially when the programs go to scale and entire prisons are shut down or construction projects avoided. What should people do in the interim?

That’s where federal assistance can come in. Part of the infrastructure/investment/stimulus money can be directed to cover transitional costs out of the prison economy. A few billion dollars of federal money in the short term can help states break the prison hammerlock, and free them to redirect tens of billions of state dollars to other purposes – from schools to roads to hospitals.

That’s the proposal: a federal grant program that helps states manage transitional costs in the short run. Much like the federal VOI/TIS Justice Department grant program helped build prisons in the 1990s, a transition grant program can help to unbuild them in the 2000s (perhaps best administered by the Commerce Department). Let the laboratories of democracy experiment over techniques, but the federal government can help ease the transition.

It’s a modest investment for the federal government that can yield substantial dividends quickly. But it needs to be consciously identified as a goal. Left alone the prison autopilot will continue to rise.

borrowed from Campaign for America's Future for the linked references go to the original article here

A message from the US Dept of Treasury

2008-12-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

...not a joke.

When will we end Republican Corporate Welfare?

Congressional Calculus

2008-11-18T22:14:00.000-08:00

Vile Ct. Senator Joe Lieberman makes me physically ill but I support keeping him on our side for now, and only until he screws up again, which won't be long. Here's why...

...having lived through the Sixties, when Liberals were far more likely to eat their own then figure out how to get what they wanted, I understand and agree with the carefully calculated considerations made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President-Elect Barack Obama when dealing with the backstabbing former DemocRATic Vice Presidential candidate.

Lieberman tossed out of his precious chairman's seat at this moment in history would begin the wonderful and golden Obama era with a cat-shit flinging contest that would leave everyone stinky, and an angry resentful Lieberman hell-bent on sabotage while closely allied with our Repugnican enemies.

Letting the whiny self-obsessed Senator stay where he is (chairmanship intact) keeps us close enough to 60 filibuster-proof seats to create momentum for the necessary high-wire Acts of Congress we're going to need to keep this country afloat and (hopefully) to build a progressive agenda regarding foreign policy, energy policy, infrastructure reinvestment, etc. If Lieberman plays to character and goes bad, siding with the dark forces, he can get kicked to the gutter at any moment and he knows it.

Besides, he never held a hearing while Bush was in office, he'll have far less opportunity to do so with Obama in the People's sacred White House.

Anyway you add it up, baring an act of God, Lieberman is toast by the end of his current term. (It's true, to reclaim in lost honor he could become a great hard-driving Democratic Senator, personally responsible for pushing through the most liberal agenda in America history, but that's not likely to happen.)

Alternatively, Lieberman is more likely to be Lieberman, close enough to the Democratic Party to allow us to move forward, while he best represents the interests of his true constituents, the people of Israel.

If he goes off the rails he becomes an even more damaged Lieberman, but in six months time, he has far less value to the Repugs and they'll have even less to offer him.

To see Lieberman in a few years, one only needs to look to Zell Miller, he who now lingers in Repugnican Hell, playing the sideshow circuit in their nightmare circus, strictly a freakshow character rather than a revered and respected former leader.

I can live with that.

LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!!!!

2008-11-18T11:07:00.000-08:00