Place

Frank Rich's piece on the little mosque in Manhattan today, as is the norm with Rich's writing, cleared the haze so as to better focus on the key determinants. He argues that the hysterical right opposition to the mosque betrays their hero General Petraeus and his efforts in the Afghanistan war which increasingly only the far right supports. In other words, the right wing, if it were true to its principles, should favor Park51, as the wee mosque is often agnostically labeled.

It has been some time since the American right wing has been true to any principle other than naked cynicism, and this is Rich's underlying point. But the corollary of this argument to me is that a principled opposition to a cynical religious project by secularists should not be stymied by the fact that the far right is in its usual purple rage about everything and anything. I oppose the project because I believe that civil society has the right to defend itself against religion and its lies and depredations, and its cynical sleight of hand and misdirection. I don't see Islam as a religion of peace any more than I see Catholicism as a defender of life or an educator of youth. New York has the right to determine zoning, and it should determine that no further religious structures should be built near the former twin towers.


All the current ratatat-tat-tat about the aforementioned little mosque in Manhattan has got me thinking in a larger sense about place. And the place of place. It is a curious contradiction in secular society that religion places so much emphasis on place, and then, their faces plain with unctuous honesty, asks us to forget about it when it suits their ends. In other words, religion proposes that certain places are more holy than others, and demands that everyone respect their determination of which places are to be so deemed. But then it backs up and says that it has the right to change the meaning of any given place without reference to any thoughts or opposition that secular society and secular individuals might have about it. They always insist that they be recognized as holding all the cards and that we submit to them.

Christian churches have argued that zoning does not apply to them, that environmental legislation does not apply to them. They run tax-free businesses that compete with their non-religious neighbors. They demand special access to education and the public purse. I am against all of that for all religions. I think secular society should always be righteously suspicious about religion in all its endeavors.

Liberal thought betrays itself when it adopts without critique the prejudices and demands of religious thought. And nowhere is the conceit of religion more evident than in its demands about place.


Various senses of place. We all enjoy what I will call the Walt Whitman sense of place: the numinous refraction of the calm majesty of life in the quiet and solitude of nature, in the waves of sensation created by wind and light and weather. As the trees bend and the grain undulates, as the birds soar and the insects hover, so our souls move in syncopation, stirring our being in harmony and in contrast to the land, water, and sky which are our home.

We liberals seek to hold on to that beauty through parks and reserves and respect for nature. I say it is precisely our secularism that opens us to the necessity of preserving nature ... those who have bought into some gawd or other can cheaply and egotistically dispense with nature in favor of the supernatural. They abandon the presence of place for the immanence of the divine. It is this "zero-sum divider" that permits the religious to adopt all manner of positions that are inimical to the expressed spirit of their own imaginary system. Yes we may be stewards of the earth, they say, but given the greatness of gawd, we still want our Hummers. When they experience the Walt Whitman sense of place, they pin it on their gawd, and thereby are vastly more likely to miss the responsibility of civil society to protect the beauty, to guard nature against our baser instincts.


Then there is the architectural sense of place. Staring up at the Empire State Building in amazement. Contemplating the Golden Gate Bridge. Indeed, marveling at Saint Chappelle in Paris. I find great comfort in the still majesty of great cathedrals and I loathe with an abiding passion the unwashed tourists who have no sense of place. I love to contemplate the ancient stones and wonder at the horrors and the pageants that they have witnessed.

It is a curiosity of modern secular life that we can imbibe place without being its victim, that we can appreciate the whispers of ancient and outmoded thought without giving up our intellect to it. The religious hate this. To this day, muslims carefully guard access to their holy places and are deeply suspicious of the presence of blasphemers and those think it is all a bunch of piffle. christians in the West put up with it because they are such an endangered species, except in this font of religious idiocy, these good old United States of America. Johann Hari's recent piece "The Slow, Whining Death of British Christianity" amply captures the political contradictions.


There is another sense of place which the religious loathe, and that is the sense of private place. At the end of long day, after the dog walk when I close the front door for the last time, I am wrapped in my personal space, the private realm where my objects and my "family" and my animals and most importantly my books warm my being and give me for those few short hours before sleep a sense that I am whole and free and, frankly, safe. The sense of private place is the great invention of modern life. It is what allows us in a practicable sense to be autonomous individuals, to choose how we live and with whom we live. Without private place, the forces of social conformity, religion chief among them, have vastly greater pull upon our lives.

When I used to hang out in Indonesia, I frequently had the experience of my host checking in on me or sending some offspring to intervene with me when I had been locked alone in my room for too long. There is a cultural predilection in Indonesia that the person alone is lonely and abandoned. They sought only to make me happy, not realizing that my happiness at the moment when the door was closed was predicated precisely upon my being in solitude.


I love Indonesia. I am fascinated by religion. I live for the exquisite whispers of place and context. But I am a free person, and I live in a free society. I am, and we should be, suspicious of those who seek to predetermine place and context, who seek to tell us who to love, what to think, and how to act. No part of me forgets that threat ever. And when I think of the horror of 9/11, I realize that it was an imposition, still broadly unrepented in the muslim world, upon a free society of exactly that idea that something, a religion, is greater than freedom. The idea that such an idea can build a temple to itself in the very shadow of the horrors of what it means is anathema to me. It should be anathema to anyone who loves our freedom from religion and its bloody trail of misery.

That is because place does matter. We, the lovers of freedom, must demand and secure our own sense of place and not surrender it to those who loathe everything we stand for.

All photos from my 2006 photo essay on Paris.

Obama, Haiti, Oracle

On the eve of what is shaping up to be a disastrous loss in the Massachusetts Senate race, and in the wake of the still patchy relief effort in disastrous Haiti, and in celebration of pretty near exactly a year of the Obama presidency, my mind wanders to that central question in modern life, the database. That is what I mean by Oracle in the title, though there are more ways to parse data than Oracle, as we know.

Every major disaster seems to follow the same script, and five days in there is a lot of confusion on the ground, those in need are not getting relief, and the international effort is bogged down. Chaos among the afflicted begins to mount as the initial shock recedes. I know I am in danger of appearing callous, and given that my only experience of disaster was the 89 earthquake here in San Francisco, I do not want to make light of the challenges faced by those who bravely go where no one wants to be.

But in this instance, as in so many, it seems to me that we are not making effective use of the new tools at our disposal. No doubt that failure is conditioned by the inertia that marks most politics at most times. But there are times in human history where entropy gives way to revolution, and this ought to be one such time, the more so given the revolutionary impact that electronic life has had on everything else.

Because what we have here is a database problem. There are evidently initial response and rescue teams scattered around the globe. They rapidly converge, but not rapidly enough, and once they are on the round, the means to move them to the actual hot spots are sadly lacking. Roads are always impassable after disasters; the afflicted always get in the way; there is always a fog surrounding information and communication. SO what those rescuers need are helicopters. In the case of Haiti, it is simply shocking that we did not have a hundred, two hundred helicopters in situ within 24 hours. That should always be the goal. And the instrument to deliver that goal should be the US Navy and Air Force.

We know people will need water and food. The world community should be stockpiling emergency supplies not where disasters happen, but where there are large concentrations of airplanes and runways. In other words, every major international airport should have a supply of water that can be rapidly airlifted to the nearest landing strip to the disaster from where those helicopters previously mentioned should move it to the site of the disaster. That coordination is all about a modern system database.

I work every day with a system database that runs one of the world's most remarkable major research universities. From my central seat, I can tell you that the database is like a teenager ... beautiful, powerful, unruly, prone to bad decisions, needs a lot of sleep (bug fixes), and always promising to be more tomorrow. But regardless of the madness that surrounds administering such a Borg, it actually works remarkably well given the immense human complexity that it endeavors to manage.

Another example of a database is the Obama campaign. The press talks about his Internet outreach and fundraising, but behind all of that was a database operation that tracked people, kept statistics, managed communication, updated and ran a web site, and evidently did a pretty good job of security also. My problem is this: notwithstanding Obama's promise to run his Presidency as he ran his campaign, why did he abandon success and repair to the tried and true? Where was that database when it was time to mobilize mass events in favor of health care reform? Where was that database when it came time to retain Edward Kennedy's Senate seat?

When I first arrived at MRU (that is the name that I give to the major research university where I hand-count bits and bytes in exchange for a few shekels delivered twice monthly), I tended to share the attitude that the database was the enemy, the great impersonal beast that wanted only to devour our individuality and reduce all variation to flat form. But I was professionally required to sell the database to the reluctant, and in doing so I came to understand that human variosity always survives the systems that are designed to contain it ... those systems strive to keep up. But persnickety abstinence is no strategy to deal with technological change, notwithstanding the Andy-Rooney common sense that is so au courant among my dear friends who like to mock social media. I have seen every excuse to resist the database. The issue is not to resist it, but to harness it to our oldest and most persistent problems.

Like disaster. And social change.

The greatest idiocy of the self-styled conservatives of the present era is their failure to see that American military might can be turned into a worldwide force for betterment and disaster relief and implied threats to the assorted ancien regimes that still haunt the planet. But this is a re-imagining. And at the heart of that re-imagining is to understand just how powerful the modern database has become. Unleash Google on disaster relief. Or unleash the amazing students who constructed the course catalog that MRU released and that I manage ... they saw in an entirely different light a problem that I understood thoroughly ... and they changed my way of understanding my own information.

So this becomes the question: when will government and international relations catch up with the technology that runs Amazon and eBay and Facebook? When it does, the Haiti earthquakes of the future will entail much less suffering.


Photos by Arod, from around town. From my ongoing series that I call "Flat Faces".

I Picked Up Two Monks Today

I picked up two monks today as I was driving back from my Sunday morning dog walk through Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach. It was at Scott and Eddy; they were standing there all a-crimson and orange be-robed. Late-middled-aged white guys, one had a guitar case. The intersection was slow and as I waited, the seeming leader of the pair put out his thumb and gave me a little smile. I waved them in on a whim, and off we went. They needed to go to 22nd Avenue and Fulton, an entrance to Golden Gate Park most proximate to the day-long concert in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

The guitar-laden of the two got into the back. These were big fellas, and I have a tiny car with a large dog of occasionally dubious temperament in the back seat. So there was some maneuvering. The transplanted suburban yuppie Frau-mit-Kindern in the giganto SUV behind me, impatient, pissily swung around to pass and gave me that little lippy look that really deserves a good slap if said slap would not sully the hand that delivered it. But, whoops, I have two Tibetan monks climbing into the car, so I stilled my pique and calmed my heart and diffused into the joy of the sublime.

The guy in the back kept chatting away as if I were not there, so I interrupted and focused entirely on the guy in the front seat. He explained their particular devotions which are ecumenical in the Buddhistic sense, though it seems that the central affiliation is with the Kagi sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

It turns out that the Moody Blues is playing the park today. I told him that the first concert I ever attended was the Moody Blues at Massey Hall in Toronto. According to their web site, "Massey Hall was a gift from the Massey family to the city of Toronto in 1894. For over 115 years, its famous red doors have welcomed audiences to a stunning array of events, personalities and artists. It has earned a unique place in Canadian music history." It's a cranky old building, but famous for its sublime acoustics. We broke in that night ... it was November 29, 1969. Perhaps I should do a 40th anniversary celebration. I do not remember the concert very well, but I remember breaking in with my friend Sara who was expert at it. We managed to get into the Mariposa Folk Festival for free once also. I was very nervous in both cases ... I do not have the constitution that would be required for criminal activity, even back in those days when I participated in the notion that everything ought to be free. That notion is still around, but only CEOs actually practice it legally.

Back to the monks. I told them that my friend Michael Merrill, dead these 20 years, was a co-founder of the Hartford Street Zen Center, and that I had been a guarantor on the initial real estate purchase. Their web site says it was founded by Issan Dorsey, but that is a long-standing myth. Issan was a distant adviser as I remember, but he was such a larger than life character that the tale is juicier when he is founder. But it didn't happen that way. I must have all that paperwork around somewhere since I never throw anything out. Perhaps I willl send it to them some day in favor of historical accuracy.

The front seat monk thanked me for my efforts given that he lived at Hartford Street for a while.

I told him that Michael had died at the hospice at Hartford Street, and then quickly corrected myself as Michael actually died in a hospice on Geary Street. He tried to die on Hartford Street, but in extremis he was moved to Pacific Presbyterian Hospital and pumped up with fluids. They have their own hospice on Geary Street, and Michael clung there to life for two more weeks. He died as I drove south to the Pac-10 tournament in 1989 with my friend Jack Green, who is also now gone.

But I didn't tell that to the monks. We kept it light. I didn't want to be proselytized; one has to be "catholic" in the rejection of religion. Swanning around in red and orange is certainly less damaging to human life than being a papist or a fundie or a mahometan ... what's in a name ... but it is still delusion. Warm fuzzy delusion, but delusion. Of course, one does not want to be put into a position where it would be necessary to bring up the bloodthirsty history of the Tibetan lamas as they actually ruled. They were rather fond of extractive torture ... eye-gouging, tongue snipping, amputation ... in aid of their hegemony. And that's the point with religion: it's all cutesy when people are blessing each other and wandering around in a haze. But religion in power, even near power, is always brutal.

I figure if I ever were to find myself in a prison, though, I would be a Buddhist. Perfect religion for atheists, they have a rich literature unlike the literature-starved post-Sumerian monotheisms that dominate the world, and the meditation would pass the time nicely.

None of this came up with my monks. I liked the guy in the front seat. The fellow in the back seemed non-plussed that his conversational dominance had been usurped by the driver of the ancient Honda Civic. Maybe he was just grumpy ... I can grok that.

I pulled around the corner at 22nd and Fulton and they piled out. The front seat monk gave me his card and invited me to drop him an email if I needed a blessing or anything. I admit I was tempted ... that is how religion gets to you. I smiled, but did not proffer my hand. I don't think monks like ot be touched.

No pics yet. I am still channeling my inner Aperture, and I should be able to make it a more worldly effort shortly.

Whores or the Whores of Bablyon

It was a dark and stormy morning, and your faithful scribbler was walking the dog when a terrible thought occurred to him ... what if we treated the Whores of Babylon the way we treat whores.

So let's think for a moment about that original Whore of Babylon, who appears in the most laughably ludicrous book in the bible, Revelations. Now, the constant reader will know that I hold that religious history is endlessly fascinating, but theology is just bunk. So in that spirit, I offer an excerpt derived from the excellent and indispensable Skeptics Annotated Bible, and then I will offer a little freelance theology which, like all theology, will be bunk:

Revelation 17
17:1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
17:2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.
17:3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
17:5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
17:8 The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
17:12 And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.
17:13 These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
17:14 These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.

Obviously the text is talking about bankers. I mean they sleep with kings, they are the acknowledged abominations of the earth, and they feed the beast. And the kings are of one mind and give all their power to the beast, that is the bankers. Now the Lamb is obviously Obama ... I mean if you change the 'O' to 'L' and flip the 'b' with the final 'a' and then pronounce the resulting double 'aa' as in 'baa', you get Laamb ... bray it aloud, Laamb ... Obama ... Laamb ... Obama. See!

I defy anyone to tell me that the official theology of the whack job fundies makes any more sense than this. For crying out loud, the Jehovah's Witnesses say that 17.8 refers to the League of Nations and the United Nations. Surely it is no more far-fetched to take Lamb and make it Obama. That reminds me of one of the most hilarious of the old late night evangelists that I used to watch when I was a grad student ... Gene Scott, deceased these four years ... who used to scratch indecipherable nonsense on a blackboard that proved that he knew the inner dissection of the words of the Bible. He always styled himself Dr. Gene Scott ... he got his doctorate in education from Stanford, but he evidently lost any commitment to proof or rationality after he fled the hallowed halls. All skeptics miss the sublime comedy act of the late, ludicrous Dr. Scott.

But I digress.


So bankers are the whores of Babylon, and there is much ritualistic if not literal flaying of these whores in the public press. Everybody wants a piece of them. Well, that would be everybody but the Department of Justice who apparently wants no part of prosecuting them for obvious fraud and malfeasance. And everybody but the Congress who still cannot bring themselves to rein in the insane executive salary self-indulgence. And everybody but the stress test "doctors" who apparently took a page from the fat, tattered tome of the aforementioned Dr. Scott when the stresses to which they exposed their subjects were apparently somewhat less than the stresses under which the rest of us labor. And, well, everybody but our sainted Laamb, Obama himself, who appears to be slowly draining the air out of the big balloon of financial re-regulation. It is of a piece, alas, with a seeming slow deflation of everything in the Obama Laamb, and I shall return to that.

In other words, when it comes to bankers, the notorious and ubiquitous tough talk of American public life amounts to nothing. They steal what they want and all the fulminations and chalkboard antics and fevered press conferences keep adding up to nothing. They fornicate with kings and "the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of [their] fornication." Face it, we are a society in which millions figured they were millionaires because they were drunk with the worthless paper upon which their fortunes were based. And face it, we took the tainted wine and we drank it deep.

Well ... "they took the koolaid, we got screwed." By the whores of Babylon.


Meanwhile, there are other whores in the news. Several attorneys general, evidently taking a break from their breathless efforts to track down the whores of Babylon, have taken it upon themselves to close down the erotic services listing on Craigslist. The South Carolinian exemplar ... proving again some 149 years later that many of the worst ideas in American life originate in South Carolina ... has threatened criminal prosecution. Craigslist to its credit has declined, at least so far. They state that they have a legitimate business interest in keeping the services ads out of the personals area. But more importantly, they argue that what people post is not the responsibility of the service which allows people free speech.

But I do not want to argue about free speech here. I want to argue that the state has no business monitoring fornication. The reactionaries who have nearly destroyed the capacity of the United States to govern itself with the Reaganite obscenity that "government is the problem" never shrink from expanding the intrusion of government into private lives. Feel-good-for-themselves liberals too often chime in with support for the continued criminalization of prostitution by bleating, Laamb-like, that many prostitutes are oppressed by their pimps, or that many prostitutes are enslaved or trafficked, or that many prostitutes are addicted to drugs. But those are not arguments ... beating up your whore is illegal, and trafficking in human beings is illegal, and drugs perversely are also illegal. Making prostitution illegal only creates space in which to oppress that portion of whores who are beaten, trafficked, or besotted.

Of course, the vast majority of fornicating occurs in a gray zone. Isn't the kept woman a whore by the definition applied to Craigslisters? Isn't the wife who only screws the hubbie whom she hates in exchange for goodies a whore too? Isn't the hot dude who trades sex with the slick codger in unspoken exchange for clothes or bling a whore? You see, the difference between sugar and whores is the explicit statement. And our fatuous, preening, red-tied moral guardians ab-whore directness of speech. I mean, people have sex ... even 'publicans. But saying you have sex is just not allowed. And publishing it on Craigslist gets these tight-necked fulminators into a briny palpitating sweat.

To paraphrase the ghoulish Revelations, the whore is arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication ... in other words, the whore dares to be proud of herself. And dare to speak, dare to be open, dare to parade your joy in pleasure and service. Dare, and the nervous, beady-browed haters and revilers will bring their loathing upon you.

I say, leave the whores alone. Bring it into the open, and chase down the pimps and the traffickers. Let people who want to have sex have sex. And let those who want to, or have to, pay for it make an honest deal with an honest hooker.


You see, it is a world upside down. The banker whores of Babylon not merely survive the conflagration they have brought upon everyone else but prosper and pile up their riches even higher. And the little minds of South Carolinians decide to target again and once again the meek and defenceless, the painted women and barefoot men who do not have filthy lucre and do not have a "golden cup" in which to collect their fornications.

Now upside down worlds are hardly a novelty. But we are in this new era, and the seeming slow deflation of everything in the Obama Laamb zone is the more deflating thereby. We know he is "no drama Obama" but he seems to be turning into the "little slam Laamb" the guy who pops out when the bases are loaded and then says that is bipartisanship. They took down some of their "fierce" pro-gay language from the White House web site ... no announcement on that one, even though they have telegraphed that they are unwilling to spend political capital on the repeal of DOMA or the end of the anti-democratic don't-ask-don't-tell. No one expects Obama to fight every fight, but there is a sinking feeling abroad that his bipartisanship shtick is a cover for shrinking from any fight. Certainly this unexpected Supreme Court opportunity will tell us a lot.

I am not in despair about the Laamb, but I have my eyes open, and I am waiting. We are all waiting.


We are waiting to find out who will stand taller in this new era ... the whores or the whores of Babylon. Stand up for the whores. And screw the whores of Babylon. Otherwise, the era of the Laamb will be a horse's ass.

Photos by Arod of sundry sights from downtown San Francisco ... except the top photo which was taken in the street in front of my apartment.

Meanwhile, aside, something I notice about the Giants' pitcher Barry Zito this year is that he has the look and nerves of a guy who desperately wants to win ... gone is the cool. I gotta hand it to Brian Wilson ... I think he made the guy vulnerable, and the winners loathe defeat so thoroughly that it hurts. Scoreless through five against the Manny-less Dodgers.

Mindset

(I significantly rewrote the latter part of this ... if you saw it without pix, then this is new to you.)

So I gotta canoodle a little ... canoodle in the wheedle sense ... when you ruminate more than poop, you get indigestion. And when a writer fulminates over long dog walks and rewrites unwritten pieces in his head, this is the definition of dithering. I have been dithering. So watching American Idol for the second night running, time to poop or get off the pot. Apologies for the vulgarity, but it has the effect of embarrassing me out of inaction.

So she stands before us, porcelain and pharaonic, her smile fixed but not unnatural. I replied to my table mate, who asked who the speaker was as we ate our bagels ... reduced from the former full breakfast proffered before Lehman Brothers announced the end of the Dubya delusion ... that it did not matter. But it turned out that, for once, it did matter. This seemingly fragile prof changed my mind.

I was at the monthly staff meeting of my unit where around a hundred of my colleagues are ennobled by the words of others. In this case, it was the words of Carol Dweck who presented her research on mindset.

So ... aside number one ... the careful reader will google Professor Dweck and figure quickly where I work which I still call MRU (major research university) in the unlikely service of the notion that no one can search the university's name and find my tendentious scribblings. And ... aside number two ... I have been working for and around and under professors in one capacity or another for almost 25 years. They are a curious lot ... I almost joined them, but the vagaries of luck and determination and strategy left me a step short. I am not angry about that because I understand it and I enjoy being who I am. But few professors, I think, fully understand that interaction of luck, determination, and strategy that leads them to their heights. Yes, heights. For professors, in time, elevate and dilate. How they deal with this metaphorical inflation is what predicts how the ambient and ethereal staff, of whom I am one, experience them. Of course, their work alone predicts their impact. But I experience them as these figures who have lost contact with the ground even as they enthuse into the air. No judgment here. There are many routes from yonder to wherever one is heading.

So we are watching this deliberate and rarefied presentation by a women so tightly presented that I was disconcerted by the off-center pin on her lapel.

But she sold me.

She presents a distinction between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Fine. But the mind blow is that the fixed mindset confronted by defeat retreats because it assumes a fixed quantity of the quality at issue. So students who have been praised all their life because they are smart, do more poorly when confronted with failure than students who have been praised for working hard.

Of course, at first blush, one quickly finds ways to apply the distinction to oneself with self-satisfying effect. That can be complex. When I find myself to be of a fixed mindset, I challenge myself and find that my fixed mindset was actually a foil for my underlying growth mindset.

I do not want to be totally cynical here. I bought her book and got a signature, and I told her, totally genuinely, that hers was that first cogent and fully articulated exposition of an educational point of view that opposed the ludicrous self-esteem movement that made so many skeptics, myself included, ill. I did not use the words "ludicrous" or "ill". I said that I had always been intellectually repulsed by the idea of self-esteem. I'll return to her response below.

The point of global theories that, objectively, come and go, is their utility, even when that utility is ephemeral. Dweck is a professor of psychology, and there is a competition of ideas in a field like psychology that responds simultaneously and dialectically both to the ideas to which it is counterposed and to the pressures of the society which is that professoriate. For part of the elevation and dilation is the intensely involuted world of a department or a field. But in considering ideas, we have to leave behind the sordid immediacy of human society.

That is how she won me over.

I am not generally impressed by psychological ideas (sorry, Matt) but this was an idea of utility which also crystallized a recognizable contradiction in what we observe in ourselves and those around us. And the presentation had the effect of mirroring in its form the idea its ought to propagate. The rhetorician in me like that. Yes it did.

The notion that academics are doomed to inadequacy because the milieu from which they emerge is human and mediated and not free resigns itself to a fixed mindset in which there is only absolute and failed, and nothing in between. Neither the world nor thought works that way. The key thing here is the conversation, no matter how attenuated and bizarre it may appear from the outside. She made one comment that showed that ... "in the worst days of the self-esteem movement." So underlying much of this work was the opposition to a movement that swept American educational scholarship ... an idea that always made me unsettled because its simplicity defied the complexity that is human experience. If we just feel good about ourselves, then everything will be fine ... perhaps 8 years of the presidency of a man who clearly feels good about himself and is filled to the brim with self esteem knocked the stuffing out of that nonsense.


Many of us have been dismayed at the way in which "theory" swamped the "content" of so many disciplines, especially literary ones. But that movement appears to be waning. Certainly, after all the theory wars, the scholarly history being written and researched today is shaking the world. The bizarre a priori nonsense that passed as feminist scholarship in the 80s and 90s is in full retreat, and nobody seems to care about it any more except for the few diehards who made their careers there. Linguistics appears to be stuck in the theory maze ... but what will blow up that miasma? Abstention or involvement ... independence or engagement?

There is no single answer here, and I will try to return to this predicament in the future. But what impressed me about Dweck was that, notwithstanding the rarified element, has made a career of undermining a misleading discourse, and in the event provided some evidence of how minds confront learning.

I guess I am shadow boxing here.

So professor Dweck convinced me that she had an idea, well researched and sufficiently credentialed. And that was pleasurable.

After the talk, I bought the book and asked her for an autograph ... no autograph hound here, but handing the book to the author is so gratifying for her that how can I deny it to her. I introduced myself to her and told her that I produced the course catalog. I paraphrase, but she said, "Ah, but the one I want to meet is the room scheduler. I have a ten minute walk from my office to my classroom." I wanted to say, but did not, "O, woman, you have a ten minute walk across a beautiful campus, and when you arrive a bunch of spectacular youth hang on your every word. What torture it must be for you."

I decided not to allow that little moment of professorial self-pity undermine my excursus into happy psycho-thought.

That's going to have to be it ... American Idol is over ... and this is whatever it is. A number of half-expressed ideas, but the true joy of a blog is the commitment to one's own self that publishing the half-expressed implies. Whatever is half unexpressed will compel me tomorrow to fill in the blanks.


Photos by Arod. The top from Castro Street, I think; the middle from some street art within a block or two of Market and Van Ness; the bottom from one of a series of me in reflection. All are in some klutzy way illustrative of mindset.

Loss

This is a terribly sad post with which to end the year ... I have been avoiding finishing it for days. But it has been a hell of year ... a year of enormous loss. So with that ...

I spent the day wandering today ... I wanted to spend some time thinking about the film that my oldest friend, Ian Mackenzie, showed us last night. The film is called The Last of the Nomads, and it is part of a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) series called The Adventurers. (Bizarrely, the full version of the film is only available in Canada; if you are in Canada, see it here.) The film won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

The film is about Ian's 15-year work with the Penan people of Sarawak; Ian has some further material on the Penan and his work here.

The essence of the film is about loss ... in this case, the loss of language, heritage, and way of life of a people who practiced harmony in a land of plenty for countless generations. The loss is cruel, and heartless, the result of the immoral greed of the ruling caste of Malaysia that enables the rape of the primeval rain forest which is the ancestral home of the Penan. They tried to stop the bulldozers in the 80s with their bodies, but they were carted away. The film documents the moment when Ian discovers that the last of the nomadic Penan have settled and sowed crops.

There is no doubt that this was "inevitable" in the sense of the conflict between industrial power and greed against a people armed with sticks and time. Social structures morph and change, and they can come to an end. Countless nomadic societies have settled ... not only now but for thousands of years. But the inevitable aspect of this cannot mask that it did not have to be such a guillotining ... that a rational approach to forest resources could have allowed sustainable extraction and continued forest-living for the peoples who, by any standard of dispassionate justice, "own" that forest.

But this film is about loss ... about an execution ... about the terminal act in the assault of a government on one of its people who were in the way of greed.


So I took a large part of the day to think about loss both in the broad, historical context of what Ian showed us about the Penan and in a more personal sense. I went to Three Wells in Mill Valley, a place where a seasonal stream cascades through a forested gully. My old friend June grew up in Mill Valley and played there as a child in the 30s long before Mill Valley became the preserve of a rich liberal caste who seem to shun you as you walk the back roads ... perhaps a projection of my imagination since I have long observed how the rich look askance at those who invade their preserves without invitation. June showed Three Wells to our mutual friend Kurt, who was a mentor and best friend, and who perished of the plague in 1992. Kurt and I went to Three wells on several occasions to sit by its cascading waters and examine the Universe, as he would call our discussions.

Loss is everywhere in human existence ... it is the sine qua non of progress and change and both personal and social development. That is not praise for loss, nor does it equate one loss with another. We cannot hold back the hands of time, as it were, and the hands of time are driven by loss. My education in loss, as I have addressed from time to time in these scribblings, was AIDS ... "the Deaths", I have called it ever since ... and I had to come to grips with the unendurable. Not unique ... and I not so much comforted myself as assuaged my fears by thinking of other more horrible losses that at least someone survives.

Remember the 2004 tsunami. Ian was in San Francisco when it happened, and together we consumed the news insatiably. We had traveled together in Aceh, and knew some of the scenes. Watching the footage was addictive, not only because of the sheer horror or it, but also because of the vicarious participation in loss ... trying to fathom the unimaginable, trying to settle your mind on top of something that cannot be endured.

But, of course, it is endured. As one reads history, that is the remarkable thing about our species, that we endure against all odds. The results, let alone the causes, are not always pretty ... and there is endurance against that which cannot be controlled and endurance against that which ought never to have been.

There is also the less panoramic but more personal loss. Three local institutions emblematic of an earlier period in the history of the Castro (the San Francisco neighborhood where I live and where the defining early events of gay liberation occurred) ... Welcome Home, a hippyish greasy spoon that was a haven for gay clones in the 70s and 80s; All American Boy, a long-time clothier who supplied the clones with plaid shirts and jeans back in the day; and Gay Cleaners, the Chinese laundry run by the strangely cinematic and curiously named Gay family, apparently kicked out with a month's notice after 30 years by a greedy landlord who evidently does not read the Wall Street Journal. I am cranky about these losses because they signal the yuppification of our gentrified neighborhood, and I loathe all the cell-phone toting yuppies with their dumb-struck boyfriends in tow. I fear the loss of my neighborhood.

What sort of a loss is that by comparison with a people who lose their homeland or their way of life. Our society turns over at a furious pace ... an unsustainable pace, one might argue, but we still wait for the final proof on that. One has to be careful to balance one's sense of outrage at loss against the greater losses that we witness daily in the New York Times.

Loss. No future without it. Indeed, there is not past without it. One cannot address lass without thinking of one of my guiding aphorisms ... to whit, that there is no such thing as a zero sum game.

I won't spend a lot of time thinking of a loss from which greater gain was had ... do we have modern Europe without the guillotine, Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War, the two great wars? Probably not, although that is not to say that all the horrors were the sine qua non. Could it not have gone another way? It turns out that there is not a lot of support in history for a flower child notion that history would have been much better if only everyone just got along.

But that is never a justification for the horrors of the moment. It is no argument that we cannot "at this moment, at this time" (paraphrasing Obama) apply reason and find ways for all sides to benefit. I think of Gaza in that sense.

And I think of those poor last nomads, Ian's friends, living in a forest hut yards from their more settled cousins, wistfully and sadly, if not bitterly, contemplating a loss whose contours even they cannot fully measure. There is no good reason for it; only greed ... a well-known historical reason. I quibble with Ian about how he records the oral texts of this people before they disappear. But I admire his courage in being willing to witness up close the agony of people unjustly stripped of their heritage, and to be willing to bear witness so that people in the future may remember these last nomads.


As I thought about this and watched the water in Three Wells, I remembered old Kurt, dead these 15 years. I remembered talking with him about issues just like this as we together watched the water swirl at Three Wells. Loss, and the future, and the unimaginable that comes true no matter what.

Photos by Arod of Three Wells, Mill Valley, California.

Tienanmen and 1848

Yesterday was the anniversary of the shooting of the insurgents on Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is telling that it is almost 20 years ago because Tiananmen is just a distant memory, Reaganesque in how passé it feels. I say this with bitterness and sarcasm, because it is passé only because it is inconvenient. Our America is so addicted to the fruits of the Tiananmen massacre ... the cheap DVD players and the iPods ... that we don't want to hear about it. Most Chinese almost certainly don't want to hear about it because they have adjusted to the quotidien reality of rising, albeit radically unfair, China.

The history-minded, however, cannot forget it, and must not. Let me explain by way of a rather circuitous route. I am reading about Prussia (Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947), and today's entry was the period after the events of 1848, in particular the massacres, through the stunning collapse of Austria in the little remarked-upon but critical 7-week Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Christopher Clark, the author of the aforementioned tome, does a good job of outlining the dynamics which the "paradigm-busting" 1848 events engendered and which continued to haunt German politics through at least 1918 and certainly arguably 1945. The problem with reading German history, of course, is that we all know how it comes out ... and it comes out with such drama and horror that one feels constrained to try to pick out of each event the teleological source of the end game of 1945. (As an aside, which anyone who readily wearies of arcane and self-indulgent convolution can easily skip, I have long been taken with the notion of the teleological ... the notion of end causes, which is to say those sorts of ideas that find in the result the necessary cause. So Christianity is teleological in the sense that the fanatics view all of history as being drawn toward the inevitable apocalypse, and Marxism is teleological in the sense that all events are merely pre-history, the necessary steps toward the inevitable revolution that draws them to it. Marxism's teleology was born of the 1848 events, so this little aside will have to find a little ex-post-teleological justification in that obvious event.)

Picking out the precursors of the Nazi horror is a silly exercise, but hard to avoid. The lazy just stick it all to Frederick. I think the better spot to start is the failure of the 1848 to mature. That is not to say that there are not plenty of other spots to look at ... but the enduring unresolved dichotomies of German history were brought to fruition in the inability of the revolution to take state power. Specifically, the contradiction between imperial military control and the struggle for civil government ended only in the catastrophic defeat in 1918. We know that the 1918 defeats were the necessary if not necessarily inevitable prelude to the 1933 events that led to the greatest slaughter in human history.

Unresolved contradictions don't go away. The German state that was founded in the euphoria of the crushing defeat of Austria in 1866 was founded precisely on those contradictions and they continued to play out over decades to come. The inability of the state, and the "liberals" who supported the notions of open democracy to overcome the imperial hangover kept the Junkers and conservatives in a position to lionize military primacy. When the crisis of 1914 erupted ... and it amounted to the last gasp of the dynastic politics that had kept Europe at war for centuries ... there was no political ability to resist what the imperialists thought was just another 19th-century war. It was not a 19th-century war, but rather the first inkling of how bloody the 20th century would be.

China should pay attention. The crisis in China to this day bears the scars of the unresolved contradictions of Tiananmen. The insurgents wanted nothing more than a stake in their own government. Had the power decided to accommodate them on some level ... and it is worth noting in this context that Frederick William IV did in fact accommodate his rebels for some months before the reaction took control again in November 1848 ... the contradictions might have assumed another form. But the reactionaries who run China cannot envision any accommodation that does not leave them in control. The Prussian situation in 1848 did have the beneficial effect of allowing the state to mature to the point where German unity could be achieved after the defeat of Austria. But the Chinese has given no quarter to its critics. The contradiction between economic growth and political stagnation grows more acute.

Contradictions do not dissolve. They find new, more fertile ground upon which to explode. In China, we have to look to the effects of an American economic collapse or to the effects of a Chinese environmental collapse. In such dire straits, what legitimacy do the Tiananmen murderers have? What do they have to offer to their aggrieved middle class ... more to the point, how effective will their policy of steel and boots be to the ignored rural masses and their sons and daughters who toil unrequited in the new massive cities? What flexibility will the state have; what elements from within will have the ability to rise above the paradigm and crate something new?

Things can last for a long time in the face of irresolvable contradiction. But a long time is not forever. I hesitate to suggest that the froaen dynamics from Tiananmen will result in a Nazi-esque episode ... but any review of Chinese history suggests that the unraveling of contradiction tends to be very expensive in terms of human life and happiness.

Happy Birthday, our brethren from Tiananmen.

Top photo from the web of the single moment that tells t all about Tiananmen ... a moment that the reactionaries who rule China wear as teir shame forever. Bottom photo by Arod of a Pan figure from Sanssouci, Frederick's "boys' club" in Potsdam.

Parking Fantasy

I've been so cranky ... undermined by a low-bore cold that will neither mature into something worth staying in bed for, or just go away so I can resume my quotidien grousing. My blogger "dashboard" is littered with unfinished posts, every one of which shares only this ... irreducible irrascibility. Can't quite see my way out of it, so I am going to fall back on a post I have written in my head many times: how to solve the parking woes.

Oy.

The key to understanding parking is to see it as a natural resource which is undervalued and largely given away free. ANd it is free parking that has allowed the suburban nightmare to choke the life out of this country and turn the vast masses into giant consuming vacuum cleaners ... mommy, I want more, more, more ... so let's hop in the SUV, head to the mall, and get the country further into debt.

So parking should always cost. But such an initiative cannot be merely punitive; it must be configured such that it encourages the desired behavior, and discourages the undesired behavior. So a city like San Francisco should announce a plan that will be successively introduced over a number of years so all can prepare, and it goes like this.

Start by constructing a series of satellite parking garages. Anyone can park for free, but there is an exit charge. It is the same charge if you stay for an hour, a day, a week, or a month. Perhaps the city might have to charge minimum monthlies to prevent people from abandonning vehicles or stockpiling them.

Vehicles should be divided into types by gas mileage ... maybve five types. And the exit charge should be multiplied by the type number. So, let's say that the exit charge is $5; a monster truck is $5 x 5 = $25. A Prius is $5 x 1 = $5.

100% of profits from the operation go to public transit.

Meanwhile, the city also has to build parking meter kiosks at every corner in the city. Parking on city streets is no longer free. The principle is that any car that parks pays something when it parks. There should be three ways to be assessed: purchase a subscription that comes with a GPS device; purchase parking using your cell phone; purchase parking at the corner kiosk. Street parking whould be per hour with variations depending upon time of day. You have to set the price so that it behooves the driver to leave the car in one place for longer. So a good driver citywise is one who parks his Prius for a week then drives a little on the weekend. But someone who drives his Prius to work every day, needs to pay more than $5 a week or he is better off than the former guy. So a day of city parking should be more than a dollar. Again, there should be a multiplier based on mileage per gallon.

100% of profits from the operation go to public transit.

All of this is eminently doable given modern databases and GPS. If the city applied to this problem the same intelligence the Walmart applies to tracking its plastic consumer froth, we'd pull it off easily.

There would have to be other sorts of payoffs. People with garages would have to rent the curb which they reserve for their own use. I park in a garage, but no one is paying the city for that curb. Why does the city give that resource away for free? And every private parking lot should be required to charge people an exit charge, 80% of which goes to public transit. So it you go to Home Depot (although there is none in San Francisco), you pay the $5 to leave just as if you were parking in a city garage. And the city would have to crack down on the explosion of fraudulent handicapped parking permits; fraudulent handicapped parking costs the city millions and creates the need for far more handicapped parking spaces than are needed. I see it every day ... able bodied people with a sticker running from their car, leaving it on the street for hours. Drives me nuts.

The effect of making people pay to park on the street and to pay only when they exit from parking garages or lots would be to benefit clustering of businesses, and to reward people for walking.

That is the broad idea. More on this later. Perhaps even some photos. I promise to get out of my funk shortly and start posting something other than fevered bureaucratic yearnings.

Sex, Money, Power

No one feels sorry for Eliot Spitzer, least of all me. But his fall is a farce ... and pile it on to the indictments of the religious and ideological dimensions of American culture ... and more than a farce, a tragedy. We have made the moral bar for public office so high, so perilous, so idiosyncratic, that it is a wonder that anyone shy of Jeeezus is allowed to run. That's how they handle it in Iran, by the way. Only they call Jeeezus by a different name.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was an idiot, and arrogant, and all that ... I am referring to Spitzer not to any putative Jeeezi. But so the flock whot, if you grok my vowel dissimulation.

Let's look at the great mystery ... it turns out that ... that people have sex. Yes, they do. People have been having sex for a long time. People also pay for sex. They pay for sex in many ways, and it is only a small minority of those who pay for sex who do so by transferring amounts roughly equivalent to a happy monthly wage for most us in exchange for present and future considerations.

Frankly, I tend to be impressed by a man who knows that he knows how to pick his whores, and how to treat 'em well. Can anyone in whose mouth butter assumes its natural warmed-up fluid state actually believe that perky Ashley Alexandra Dupre would be better off or happier in a job at MacDonalds or perhaps as a meter maid or, gawd phorphend, as a state bureaucrat processing license applications in Albany. Not saying that I recommend a life of prostitution, but there are plenty of folks who have done well by it, and that goes lo these centuries and millennia.

The morally rousable will point to the poor crack addict whores who people the dark alleys roughly a 13 minute walk from where I write. But I aver that their biggest problem is not prostitution but the illegality that accompanies it and serves as a shield between them and help and care. How does busting them, dragging them to jail, and then dumping them back into the hands of their pimp actually help them? Riddle me that.

But I digress.
So, let us accept as our starting point that people have sex ... yes they do. Let me go further in asserting that American society right now, as we speak, is the most sexually active, sexually diverse, and sexually prolific society in the history of humanity. Gosh darn, it's a heck of a lot of fun ... barrel of monkeys. The vast majority of sex going on is victimless ... sure we have rape, and we have coercion, and we have manipulation. But some degree of evil attends all human endeavor. Even figure skating has its Tanya Hardings, for crying out loud, and no one is calling for an end to figure skating as far as I know. Imagine if we applied our fevered public face against sex to religion ...

Governor Spitzer today admitted that he is a member of a church that requires its members to pay for services, and moreover, Governor Spitzer secretly wrote large checks to a institution that lies, bedevils the innocent, manipulates the hapless into wasting perfectly good Sundays listening to their nonsense, and propagates fantastic idiocies as irreducible truths. The National Commission on Good Sense is outraged. Rationalists all over the country are demanding his resignation. The governor is currently cloistered with his priest although reliable reports indicate that both are still fully clothed. No choir boys are known to be involved at this juncture.

There is much falderal about feeling sorry for his wife. Let me state my bias ... I have been in three fabulous committed relationships, 10, 6, and 10 years and all of them open. I would have been in no relationships had they been "closed". Of course, now I am happily single and about as far from the dating scene as a jackass from a salmon fishery, but I think you grok the nature of my approach to sexuality. I think it is one of the pleasures that gawd gave us, and she-he who forsakes it gives up a good time when few await us beyond the grave. There should be no coercion in matters of sex, but let anyone who wants it seek it out.

The point of regulating sex is to regulate human economic, political, and social power. The point of the monotheistic religious loathing of sex is that sexually free people have no need of priests or their black magic. The point of applying ludicrous sexual rules to politicos is not the "honesty" thang, but to make sure that free thinkers play no part in public life.

One day, some horny politico is going to give a speech like this:

Okay, you caught me. I am not going to resign because I am a good person, an honest person. My wife knew I screwed around, and she told me more than once that if a whore kept me from buggin her at 3 in the morning because woody was interfering with my sleep ... well, bully for her. The only thing is that she has always insisted that I never see the same one more than twice. Anyway, I still love the old broad, and I hope she doesn't sue me for everything I am worth. I promise to publish the names of all my whores, but only 96 hours after we meet so they have time to change their aliases.

Larry Craig came close, but not close enough.

Photos of Arod by various homoerotic images about town, all from a walk with Loki a few weeks ago ... Rufus Wainwright, some advertising dude, something crypto-classical in the Mission.

Heath and Moors

Heath Ledger's numbing death reminds me of Pip, of Dickens' Great Expectations.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

The fearful man was Abel Magwitch, a convict, who repays the kindnesses of young Pip with a fortune later in life. The fortune was earned in Australia whither Abel Magwitch had been condemned before returning to see the smile on the face of the young man whom he had helped. No smile though, for Pip was most aghast at the revelation that his benefactor was one so low.

In the face of death out of the blue, we are each one of us Pip .. afraid, suppliant, willing, retiring. What recourse is there against cruel untimely death.

Ledger could have played Magwitch, or he could have played Pip. He was that plastic. In either event, he is descended as are most Australians not from the Pips but from the Magwitches. Perhaps the allure of the Australian is that Magwitchian temperament. But in this sad moment, not to think of such fancies.

My memory of the young Heath is this. It was Christmas 2005. The careful reader will know that I imbibe much from Christmas, and use the season to skate on emotion, and freeze that emotion lest I forget in the intervening madness of the long year of making a living. For several such seasons, I had noticed the rise of an allergic reaction to something in Christmas ... I have since deduced that it is the cedar I bring into the house ... and I sought refuge from my sinuses one rainy day between Christmas and New Year's in a long drive. I went to my old haunts at Cal in Berkeley, abandoned of its normal denizens for reasons again of the season. I wandered about on the campus of the nourishing mother in the rain, and then headed north in the East Bay, picking my way across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge which soars past the depths of San Quentin, and then I zig-zagged down through Marin County to Mill Valley. And, lo, Brokeback Mountain was showing at the famous local theater. So, on a whim, I bought a ticket and settled in. You must realize, here, that I never go to the movies, that I loathe the crowds, and that I prefer my own company to a bunch of yappy popcorn-eaters. I also avoid the movies because I prefer to suffer the emotion that great art induces in solitude, and in control of the pause function, so that I am the more immune to the wash of sorrow and fear.

I shushed a couple of yappy ex-sorority gals, and settled into Heath and Jake. The performances left me without air, drained. Heath dancing with the clothing of his deceased lover ... I live in a house filled with the memorabilia of the army of friends I have lost to the plague ... it was love and longing and the impossibility of living without dread and anguish. From my groin, it was Jake I loved; from my heart and gut, it was Heath.

The next evening, my oldest friend Frobisher dragged me out of my isolation to a movie at the Sony Metreon. But, alas, Frobisher had misread the newspaper, mistaking a.m. for p.m., and whatevver froth we had envisioned was not available. The only movie left was Casanova, starring, ta da, the young sexy Heath Ledger. What a romp! Farce and the comeuppance of the self-righteous and a bunch of sexy repartee. What does not please here!

So, I ended up going to the movies two days in a row after not having ventured into a theater for over a year ... and both starred Heath Ledger.

Now, without a hint of a warning, he is gone. It reminds me of the emotion of when River Phoenix died. Both were keepers, men who would have grown into depth and vigor unike the frothy nothings who populate People magazine. I have never recovered from River Phoneix' death, and I think I will never recover from the passing of Heath.

Death and the gonads ... it is not that one harbors some realistic hope of a trist with a Heath. Rather, it is that he represents some ideal of the glory of the male erotic. Not strident, but nuanced. Not a stomp but a song and a dance. Not rage, but a dance of irony and joy and play and strength.

When we mourn our cinema heroes, we mourn our hopes, our faint dreams. I want to be Casanova. I wanted to be Heath. No longer.

When I was a boy, I wanted to know Pip, I wanted to wander with him on the moors. I wanted to suffer with him, exult with him, settle with him. Heath was Pip, and I wanted to know him as the sad man left alone in Montana, and as the prancing dandy in Venice ... but now he is Magwitch, a cadaver, gone, dead. Gone dead. Too sad.


Further short reflection on Heath here, and my friend Jim Gaither's correspondence with Roger Ebert on Brokeback Mountain and the Oscar's here

Bhutto and the Tiger

Three years ago, we were transfixed by the epochal tragedy of the great Boxing Day tsunami. This year, it is Bhutto, and Tatiana the tiger that could and did and paid for it. Tragedies both, but these victims unlike the innocents on the beach of three years ago, paid for playing. My point here is not to judge the fairness of any of this, but to look at the role of accident in history a bit.

Assassinations are quite common in history, tsunamis are very rare, and zoo-based tiger predation of visitors almost unheard-of. Almost. That's the key word ... almost. One in a million is not zero. So when the strangely unrattled parents stated that things like this never happened to people, they forgot that one .... one in a million.

Let's start with Bhutto. It seems odd to me that it took her enemies so long to get her. She's been back in Pakistan for a couple of months, after all, and this is a place where political murder has been a commonplace at all levels of society. It looked like a well thought out operation at first, but then we find out that there was essentially no security and that it is at least possible that she was killed by banging her head. Even if a bullet did kill her, scoring a hit even at short range would be a crap shoot considering the pressing mob surrounding her vehicle. If she's inside the vehicle, the suicide bomb doesn't get her. So my skepticism ... reeking, to use the phrase of a former colleague in the "movement", of coffee and upholstery ... enjoys the notion that she cracked her skull on an armored SUV sunroof knob. I do not enjoy the fact that she has been killed because in the darkness that is the Pakistani future, she was at least a 5-watt bulb of hope for some sort of ephemeral moment of stasis or quietude.

But the fact is that her assassination is an accident. It might not have occurred. If she hadn't cracked her head, maybe she could have shamed Musharraf into providing some security. Maybe she might have bought herself a pope-mobile. This is not a one in a million accident ... more like a one in a hundred, or in fifty.

There are definable, albeit highly volatile, forces at work in Pakistan. But the accident of this assassination is a wild card, and a deterministic view of history can't predict either the fact of accident or the effects. After the fact, we can point to the dominant factors. Before the denouement ... whenever that might be ... we can speculate based on the factors. But we can't account for the accident, and accidents do occur.

The press, and especially the droning reciters on television, provide no context and merely look about nervously to see if they can repeat what someone has said while appearing original at least to themselves. I have yet to hear anyone talk about the ethnic issues ... Bhutto is an aristocratic Sindhi, christian- and western-educated, and I recall that she is Shia but I can't confirm that. Musharraf is an Indian-born Mohajir, the first mohajir Pakistani head-of-state. Nawaz Sharif is a Punjabi. Punjabis plus Sindhis plus Mohajirs equal about 70% of the population; the tribal areas have about 15%, considerably less than 15% of the economy, and even less of the army which is what counts.

All that said, it is not clear who follows Bhutto. An accident trumps it all, at least until the accident becomes a stable part of the equation in the course of time's inexorable march. And that is part of the problem with understanding accident in history ... the accidents of yeteryear come to feel like they had to have been. Not so. Maybe it all would have turned out the same, but we don't, and can't, know that.

So to the tiger ... from tragedy to farce, as it were. I am convinced that the three little shits who paid with their bodies for the tiger's rage had goaded it into coming after them. The evidence seems to go there. The tiger was loose for 19 minutes, and only went after three people. The tiger grotto is 40 years old and no tiger has escaped before. Sundry projectiles are found in the moat ... by the way, is a moat still a moat without water in it? I think it's a ditch.

Even so, this is a one in a million accident. Little shits torment zoo animals all the time. I remember watching little Indonesian shits throwing lit cigarets at an orangutan who was mired on a treeless island surrounded by a watery moat. The orangutan ate the cigarettes. What sort of creep torments a zoo animal? How low can someone sink? Well, it turns out that the surviving Dhaliwal brothers are local tyrants who get drunk and act up and terrorize their neighbors. They have sundry drunk-and-disorderly type charges pending. Notwithstanding the valueless pronouncements of San Francisco's poster-girl police chief, this was a crime scene, and the tiger was the hapless victim.

Still ... one in a million. Sousa ... the dead one ... gets a Darwin award, but his elimination form the gene pool was not a result solely of stupidity ... stupidity has never been a bar to reproduction, alas ... but the result of dumb bad luck. Again, the coffee and upholstery skeptic in me wonders why a tiger with 19 minutes on his hands couldn't have saved the neighbors any further trouble with the Dhaliwal boys, but that too is accident.

You can't predict these things. The results will be reams of ink, as they say in the news biz, and at least three lawsuits. It will cost San Francisco and the nominally independent zoo a pot of money. And there will be breast beating about tigers in capitivity, and less attention to the fact that there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild.

All the result of an accident.

And then those poor sods washed out too sea three years ago ... I still think that the Indonesian death count is radically low. I have never seen a proper estimate of the number of people living on the northwest shore of Sumatra before the waves, or a reliable count of the survivors. I think ... again, coffee and upholstery ... that the Indonesian count is more like 300,000 than the official 170,000. To the victims, it was a bizarre accident, literally out of the blue. Maybe mother earth knows when massive earthquakes occur, but in history they come out of the blue even if we know that they must come sooner or later. That epochal accident cleared out the poor for Thai tourism developers, and it provided the basis for a settlement of the Acehnese war that has raged off and on for 150 years. It also gave a boost to the religious police who now wander about with whips and sticks to stick and whip insufficiently shrowded women and young folks sitting about and talking unchaperoned.

Out of the blue, one in a million. An accident. Never underestimate the accidents of history.

Photo by Arod: Street art at 14th and Valencia in San Francisco.