It all makes cents

Perversion in Education

2011-03-19T15:28:00.003-05:00

These days, Republicans hate teachers. I guess this is so true that my teacher mother might change her long Republican allegiances if she was capable, after hours of watching Fox News, of independent views. She isn't very capable of this; none of her experience in the first half of the Twentieth Century suggested to her that independence was desired or even tolerated in women. Indeed her female relatives that tried for independence were treated with great brutality. I can't blame her for choosing aggressive adherence to tradition as her way of getting through.

But this hating of teachers ...

I think I understand it, as a matter of gender politics. (Male teachers are still the exception; no one, I think, takes them very seriously as Alpha Males and men in this country are measured against the Alpha.)

I suppose that is part of the hate: Non-Alphas, if long-time teachers, will have better retirements than many businessmen of middling talent. Zounds. The world set on its ear. Wrongness of the Universe.

But teaching is a female profession, and the real, unforgiveable, offense is that Women, if long-time teachers, will (in this brief window of time) have better retirements than many businessmen of middling talent. This cannot be allowed.

Of course even the malignant usually need more than one reason to justify the virulence of such hate, and that additional thing is: Women are accustomed to teach values; always have been.

Here, I think, is the real offense. It was tolerable in past times for women teachers to teach values to young boys, because the profession was so rigorously segregated and under-compensated. Even young Alpha Boys knew that the patriarchs they would someday join out-ranked the female teachers. Even subjected to the authority of women while they were small, young Alpha boys could plainly see that they would, almost without effort, eventually out-rank all women in authority of all kinds. With a modicum of effort, boys-become-men could be pre-eminent in ranks women could only enter on their backs, by marrying.

Heady, sexual, stuff, and their Alpha fathers must have reminded them of it often in those conversations that in those days no one ever had with their daughters: The conversations where the fathers explain to their sons the difference between the real world and the fantastic images of equality, courtesy, fairness and artistic achievement inculcated by Women in their Schools. I know my father did, and he was among the kindest and best of men, but he knew wealth was available only to the tough (not to say ruthless). He saw his kindness as a disqualifier, no matter how deep his personal commitment to it.

It is these men that are the enemy. They see how useful amorality and ruthlessness are in amassing wealth and THEY DO NOT WANT THEIR SONS WEAKENED IN THIS BATTLE BY WOMANISH VIEWS.

It was perhaps tolerable that under-paid women and teachers would train the young in these ideas, and of course these ideas are useful in employees. But Alphas raising Alphas need these ideas terminated, or restricted to education of followers. The rich who want to teach their young to lead do not want any mistakes made; and respect and fair wages for teachers send entirely the wrong message.

For Tim's Mother

2010-06-26T10:28:00.003-05:00

There she was, and wasn't -- not
the kind of mother I wanted (and had),
crouched over a note-pad, writing.

She was a different kind of mother, social,
active, stylish, made of a friendly heart,
and with a light touch; she never thought
I needed amending, and maybe thought of me seldom at all
but that I liked, stretched out beneath that canopy of bright leaves ...

She was a mother tree, broad not deep,
but what strength that takes!
calling in to question what we could possibly mean
when we sometimes criticized.

I miss her today.

Stylin' on Christmas

2009-12-20T00:40:00.004-06:00

Christmas! Heart season in the Heartland. Surrounded by snow and colored lights, I am sinking into it like a rich piece of cheesecake, and tonight I ate that too.

Tonight I also listened to a whacked panel of Religious Professionals parsing the New Testament and trying to correct rhetorical inaccuracies. Oh my.

My own faith is an old one, Eastern Orthodoxy, not very inclined to compromise the heart of the story -- shepherds, wise men, virgins, Son of God.

Tonight for the first time I thought it might not be strictly necessary to insist on the fundamentals. I do take them for true but if I didn't have Mary, Joseph and Jesus -- my honored acquaintance! -- to people my faith, then I still think it would be the same. The part of me that believes lives in dangerous terrain where the sense of God-with-us is always at the right hand. I don't know whether I could say that this is "Bigger than Jesus." Who am I to say it, and how could I possibly know?

But whatever it is, it is very, very big; bigger than parsing those ancient stories. Even the best retellings miss the heart-pounding part of the living moment, not to mention much of the most convincing detail. And what is really important is not how God chose to transmit the message -- His choice, not mine, after all -- but whether I am listening.

And when others hear, if they hear it differently, maybe that doesn't matter too much either, as long as they hear it. It's important news: God is Right Here! The parsing is just a reflection of human personality styles; never take it for more than that.

{ In fond memory of Mervin Freedman, who taught so many how to study that quicksilver, "personality" }

What Would Jesus Do About Those "Death Panels"?

2009-08-20T22:04:00.005-05:00

I am pretty clear about how I'd like to die.

First of all -- later, much later; but if I had my preferences, not as late as my father, who suffered through a long dementia. Now he was the quintessential brave man and he soldiered on, even with increasing sweetness, as his disease progressed. He was enough himself that he knew what was happening at each sad stage. I would rather not have to bear that burden as long as he did!

I think though that at the far end of the journey, he could no longer figure out how to surface from the confusions that pulled at him. It seemed like that to me, and it seemed that he chose then to dive off the cliff into that dark night, cooperating fully with what was coming. He showed no sign of fear, and when I think about it the same words always come to mind: He died expeditiously.

I am not expecting that much fortitude from myself, and I hope I don't have to watch my mind shatter in stages as I go, but I would like to meet the process with what faculties I still have. I hope for a short illness, a little time to see the Reaper coming, and prepare; and then to die in the daylight, preferably in sunlight, to see what It Is, that last experience in a body's weight of sensations that I have pulled along with me through life.

I'd like a short illness, not too many pain-killers and quiet.

What I don't want is: To be still taking vitamins and cholesterol meds at the end, or that high blood pressure stuff that seems a little silly in the face of multiple organ failures.

I don't want to be in the throes of chemotherapy, or to die after consuming an expensive course of treatment or a grossly expensive series of tests. I hope my doctor sees my death coming too, and after he tells me, revises my meds to avoid wasting them on vain struggle.

I REALLY don't want to leave my widower a huge hospital bill that he can't pay, for treatment no one expected to restore me to a decent, aware life.

Are you hearing euthanasia here?

Not so much. I have taken gravely to heart the Christian insight that it is our mortality that forms our whole being. I believe it and I am, in that small sense, not afraid of it at all. After a life brimming with kinesthetic awareness -- I may have been a lawyer, but I used to dance -- I could not love my physical being more, nor be more intensely curious about that last grotesque experience. I see this as a former dancer's way of thanking God for the gift of physical life, and if I want to go to it by a more direct path than modern medicine wants to offer me (not talking suicide here; just judicious selection of alternative therapies) I will not have the duller of my purported co-religionists stepping in to tell me that I must cling to life in some other prescribed way instead.

I have taken to heart as well the American Dream; and I will not be denied the right to direct my own passing, as much of it as God leaves to me that is!

{ Shame on Sarah Palin and Charles Grassley for lying (Sarah) and dissembling (Charles) about things like this, the Things of God. }

Queen Anne's Lace

2009-08-15T21:20:00.006-05:00

I see my last post was in winter.

Some things don't change. The weather has continued odd. The financial crisis has worsened.

Some things do change. One thing to note is: Even in a "Cold Summer," lots of things grow well. Grass grows nicely when it's wet -- never fully reliable in Wisconsin any more, but most of this summer has been adequately lubricated.

Weeds almost grow better in the cold; profusion, really. I think they must be more cold tolerant than what we Europeans brought with us. Anyway, they grow, while tomatoes hang sullenly green or refuse to fruit at all and corn pushes skyward without cobs. A cold green paradise without appealing foods till the berries thrust up in mid-summer, and suddenly the richness began -- swollen blueberries, a rich garnet setting of mulberries on every mulberry tree and the Queen of All Berries, the tangy and succulent raspberry.

After that, I sensed it -- the crops are beginning to come in and though I longed for richer things, I can see that the land is productive even if not quite in what I prefer.

The truth is that what I prefer in Summer is Heat, yet here on August 15 was the first of the Hot Summer Nights we need before the next winter sets in.

I guess there were a few before, although I know it wasn't many. Maybe 5. Every time it got hot, a front came in and the temps rocketed back down, but there were those few nights. I missed most of them, busy with work and long commutes.

Tonight though I finally had the time to take a walk, in air thick with moisture, leavened only with an insistent breeze.

I tell you, it's not enough. I'll need a month of these -- not likely, either! -- to be ready for the annual freeze-up, and yet I felt myself opening up and threatening to be lost in the sheer physicality of friendly temperatures, in the human body range. A suggestion that the moisture in the air and the water in my veins and skin might well find a way to merge and give me for a moment a god's-eye glimpse of how it all hangs together on earth.

All the beautiful things amid their tragic short endings. Me thinking that even if I died tonight, I couldn't say it was a life cut short. All the muscles still work well enough too, and the aches and pains are far from overwhelming for my age. Luckier than I have had a right to ask; I think luckier even than I ever did ask after my short list of demands on the universe was met when I met my husband.

I think I have a summer spirit, easily pleased, here in this frosty land; and I think that will have to remain our little secret because my business, really, is sterner stuff.

I am a financial lawyer, after all.

But in this late summer, when Queen Anne's lace pushes up joyfully on every untended bank and the garden begins to gallop toward harvest, I've got a secret that most of the time I don't even dream of: It is enough.

Someone May Need to be a Weatherman After All

2009-03-07T08:15:00.003-06:00

A weather report while I wait: Birdsong outside this morning! I had forgotten that was gone. Saw my first ducks and geese fly in about 10 days ago; had forgotten that they were gone but the set-down approach to landing is distinctive. I saw some pairs first, and then one "v" form in the sky. Eventually the sky will be laced with them, like pencil marks in the margins of a book.

And red-winged blackbirds in the field! I forgot that they were gone too. My mother says they're just flying through, and will summer further north. All these realities you notice and soak in from the land around you.

A social security judge flew in from Pasadena for hearings though. It was about 12 (F) degrees at mid-day. My attorney-girlfriend said the judge appeared simply stunned by the weather, and it has been a black, heavy sort of winter, the melting snow laced with dirt. Snow flakes themselves are a kind of tonic; heavy, melting drifts, not so much.

My friend shared her story of snow-shoeing to work in December after one of the blizzards. She's guessing the judge will never forget it, or maybe will forget it at once because it just doesn't seem real.

A lot of people are going to lose their homes. Our loan broker "knowledge workers" sold products that otherwise solvent people are never going to be able to pay; much less the grandiose dreamers who bought the adjustable products.

Where's the rage? We're raging against neighbors who might get better deals than we do if they slide into foreclosure? It makes more sense to rage against the bureaucrats who are giving those deals, yes, but where is the rage against the "small government" / "tax cuts will cure cancer" crew? I think I have never seen anything as amazing as the furtive bands of republicans surging through the weeds, muttering "Bush betrayed us and Obama is not a citizen ..."

Oh, man; I just heard a crane call, a much bigger sound than the other birds! Spring then, too early and less secure than we all thought. There are things here worth saving; where is the rage? Where are the brains?

Who Let the Snakes In?

2009-02-14T08:43:00.006-06:00

I'm often sad, these days, that there are so many sibilants in Nancy Pelosi's name. People are so ready to hiss it, anyway, to express visceral hatred.

I, who still wish I could be Nancy Pelosi when I grow up, find this moronic. Nancy Pelosi is effective and attractive at an age when most women fade into a shapeless softness, saving their tongue-lashings for hapless daughters-in-law and wayward children. Nancy Pelosi, instead, is waging a daily battle to rescue a nation dragged almost into insolvency by a feckless President in the grip of mindless devotions himself.

George Bush betrayed the truth for a fantasy Christianity and a fantasy realpolitik of successfully being the biggest bully on the block. I'm so surprised no one but me (with my minuscule readership!) writes about the terrible internal inconsistency of those two. I guess secular commentators have made up their minds about the spiritual bankruptcy of a religion that blesses pre-emptive war. Such has been George Bush's Christian testimony.

Bush and McCain then went on, as our economy collapsed under the lies of the Unregulated Rich, to prescribe that fantasy nostrum as a cure: Tax cuts! Oh yes, the Rich having scuttled the ship with their bonuses intact, we should mortgage the future to make it safe for them to profit in new ventures! We being the middle class people without health insurance or retirement investments, journeying into old age (or raising young children) in a country the rich no longer feel allegiance to.

It does need to be said that true patriots would not have acted as the Lords of Finance did in the '90's.

The truth is that Nancy Pelosi is correct: It's time to save the rest of us from the destroyers of the Republican True Believer crew; and they will never forgive her for that. I admire her unwillingness to quail before them. The woman doesn't seem to know how to quail!

And while I do call on her to put her own financial house in order -- she, like all who became rich in the Lying Decades just past owes the rest of us a great deal -- I will give her time to figure that out.

Right now there is an emergency, and the hissing sibilants on the public scene are coming from the perpetrators, refusing to admit what they have done to the country (and some of them, to the religion) to which they say they are devoted.

Maybe we are blessed, after all, that the Speaker's name has sibilants. It brings out so clearly the true heart of the opposition she faces.

Just Say No

2009-01-26T07:27:00.003-06:00

No great fan of Nancy (or Ronald) Reagan, I still honor the usefulness of her simple anti-drug phrase. Now I apply it to the culture, and I am nervous about where it may take me. Watching Barack Obama take office, I plumb the my doubts about my country. Can we live without the things we never should have accepted? Can we even assemble an appropriate list.

Perhaps if I start with the things that were obvious to me, their offensiveness shocking me as people around me nodding in sage acceptance:

When did a "Christian nation" ever even imagine, much less adopt as political writ, the idea that if we must fight, it is better to take the fight to the enemy's homeland than to endure it in our own? {Note to the perplexed, right here where I am now, we are a Christian nation. If this doesn't include you, don't feel left out! It's just a fact here.}

I am so dazzled by that one, I think I need to take a break before going further ...

Sirod

2008-12-06T08:48:00.002-06:00

Did I ever say how I played violin in high school? I stopped
practicing enough -- boy-crazy -- and now I regret it.

There was, and is, also something unsatisfying to my about Western
stringed instruments. The one instrument that sounded exactly right
to me, enough to make me want to play it, was the sirod, a sort of
Indian metal and wood guitar -- the metallic tones to the sound
rounded out the whole tone for me. Beautiful stuff, but I was long
past the age to pick up an instrument, or even to want to. I've
never been that fond of the piano either, a little too predictable.

Or I would have said but Thursday I heard a piano-violin duet, violin by David Oistrakh, that was just stunning. Both instruments had a liquid, silvery tone that you just can't get all the time, the tone I always miss in them. Who knew this was possible?

I see there's a new offering at NetFlix, a movie of Oistrakh's life.
If I just had the patience to finish signing up for NetFlix, but in
this busy, busy life -- not so much!

It must also be time for me to contribute to NPR -- I spend a lot of time on the road and I can't stand to listen to another whining country song.

For the last time, fella, it is NOT enough to stop thinking when you set up a household and reproduce. You've got to keep thinking and learning all your life ... or did you think the Founding Fathers' main goal was to make the world safe for truck driving and self-medication? Did you think when Christ commended little children that he meant that only simplistic ideas should darken the instincts of a Christian?

Did you think all this was supposed to be easy? Listen to some violin music today, or some sirod, and imagine what complexity can do!

Best Day

2008-11-27T09:05:00.002-06:00

This is the Best Day! Thanksgiving in adulthood has quietly become my favorite holiday. Christmas is a better party and it might be more irreplaceable. Easter is sublime but more a feast (religious, that is) than a holiday.

Thanksgiving comes though after the exertions of early Fall. It's a welcome rest in the way that those other two holidays never are. (You can see we do it quietly at our house; no dramatic, huge spreads. I'm not that much of a cook that I invite the whole neighborhood over!)

It's secular religion-lite too. You couldn't have it without the impulse of Christianity and the peculiar weather and early history of the United States, and it suits us. Autumn is a Northern hemisphere glory and perhaps more in the maple forests of the new world than in the old.

It makes sense to celebrate before the hard winter sets in, and there's precious little animism abroad in the U.S.. We don't set bon-fires to appease dark spirits that we don't entirely believe in but we do pause before the onset of that winter, bigger than we are, that reminds us of our status on earth as invited guests.

I hope we continue to remember. We have often been greedy or unruly guests, ruining what we touch. That's not okay. I hope we remember, and I sense, each Thanksgiving, that most of us do and for that I am grateful.

So on this day, fractious as I often am at other times, I feel comfortable and at home, where I am, a member of the group.

Blighted Years

2008-11-12T06:49:00.003-06:00

In the aftermath of the Obama victory, I'm thinking things I haven't thought for a while.

I'm reminded of a science fiction story -- a world in the future, its planet so degraded by abuse and time that all living creatures, at all times, were in unbearable pain which they survived by a rigorous social consensus that all was well.

I read this long ago, flush with youth myself. I don't think I was even a teen-ager yet; certainly not an adult. It even, such was my innocence, took a few minutes, maybe an hour, before the thought crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't so much science fiction as social commentary.

I was too young to entertain the thought for long, and there was no one on the event horizon who would understand me at all if I asked about it or commented.

But it stayed with me, along with a later fantasy world overloaded, by a malignant nature, with addictive substances. That couldn't be us, could it? Sugar, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, corn chips (CORN CHIPS!!!).

When later I became a Christian again, after a few months pondering the attractions of The World-Flesh-Devil, I had a moment of shock when I began to sense what underlay the concept, the rot in politics, television, novels, architecture, restaurant dining, couture. Don't get me wrong, I love and approve all these things, but they can't, these days, pretend to the same awe they inspired in my youth.

You can scare yourself with these thoughts but you can't live a life which escapes them. The honest man lifts the curtain of maya, and really wants to know what's back there, good or bad.

In the aftermath of this election, and the stunning sense of freedom that has been leaking at the margins of my cynicism since then, I think I see my whole life span till now as suffering under a blight of political lies.

What was exciting about Barack Obama politically was that he could laugh at the lies told about himself. Who does that?

The fact that this strategy succeeded still dazzles me. I have been told for so long that this doesn't work, that national politics is a "no mistakes" arena where candor is disallowed.

The fact, though, is that Obama took the truth to the literate through the medium of the internet, and suddenly America seems to be full of people who actually can think and evaluate the news.

Who knew?

And if this is true, what else is possible?????

The Worst Kind of Woman

2008-10-12T08:19:00.002-05:00

Far away, hard to remember now, in Berkeley in the '70's, I worked for an eminent psychologist, an exquisitely sensitive man with the knowledge to make sense of the nuances and shades he saw around him.

We talked a lot over drinks in those far away days, and it was all very pre-PC. I doubt a married 50 year-old these days would spend so much time in public bars with a 25-year old assistant, and it's too bad because what I needed in those days was a father who could speak my language -- the language of exquisite sensitivities and the desire to figure them out.

That's what I got over drinks in those days, and it's all I got or even wanted.

(One of the beauties of innocence, and its grown-up cousin chastity, is that whe you have either one, you can go where you want and do what you want to do, confident that you will not transgress. Heavens, in those careful days, I was seldom even aware of being tempted ...)

But the point of the story is not how I gained the benefit of these observations, but one of the observations itself. For my friend had studied personality development in young college women. Without knowing whether some wily fox had selected such an enticing study cohort, I'm pretty sure the study was carried out with little dalliance. It was the '50's after all and the ladies in question were privileged. One would have been in trouble trifling with them ...

So we talked often about this study, and I don't remember the details very well because I was so embroiled in the same issues for myself, and not at a sheltered Eastern women's college either.

But there was the occasional observation that surprised me because it answered a question I had not yet dreamt of asking.

So one day -- and remember again that this was long before PC had cleansed our language of some many comparisons, the invidious as well as the profound -- my friend commented: "She is the worst kind of woman."

I had no idea what it meant, and today I don't remember whether we were discussing someone we knew or someone caught in that study like a venomous bug in amber. So all I remember is the phrase, with its intimation that women were given to certain kinds of personal vileness, different perhaps from those that afflicted men and ... and perhaps this was the most trenchant part of the observation ... failings that could be recognized. Studied, catalogued and recognized.

No one thinks like this any more; or perhaps just the more retrograde religious people do. But it's a deep observation and I wish it were more in the public domain these days.

Because one of the "worst" traits of any human is the failure to appreciate the limits of one's authority; and one of the worst traits of women who have been out of the job market for an extended period is to fail to appreciate that there are things they don't know.

Sarah Palin toddled from the soccer field to the governor's mansion, surrounded by family. And when she got there, she used the constitutional powers of the governor to protect her family, with all the passion of a hockey mom rooting from the sidelines.

And that's not the rules of the game; it's not how the game is played, mostly because it's wrong. Political authority can't be used for private gain, not legitimately in a democracy.

In the corruption quagmire of Alaska, it could have seemed to Sarah Palin that getting a temperamental cop fired was not corruption since it didn't involved monetary gain for her personally. That's what she says now anyway, although the idea is a laughable as a point of public ethics.

And even if you believe that it's true -- and Palin's record for truth-telling requires one to deeply discount everything she says -- even if it is true, this is just one more example that the woman is vicious, but not too bright. And she is by no means a fine observer because she still thinks the goal of being in the public domain is to increase and protect her own family, and spread abroad the glory of their family vision. A hockey mom, from a state that is a cesspool of corruption, laying down the law on issues private and public from her self-chosen position at the sidelines of a child's game.

I don't remember what my friend thought was the worst kind of woman, but I think I have found a vivid example.

Lack of Reflectivity

2008-10-04T11:52:00.007-05:00

It's hard for a certain kind of woman -- MY kind of woman -- to write about Sarah Palin without being catty. Women are much more sensitive than men to the power urges of the women in our midst, and Sarah Palin gives off massive surges of will-to-power. What else she does -- hence our negative response -- is pretends it isn't there; the will-to-power, that is.

This is foremost a matter of grooming, and perhaps Christian (or Muslim or Jewish Orthodox) grooming at that. So much of modern American womanhood has gone over to the style of the well-preserved hooker that it's surprisingly relaxing to observe a woman who projects a controlled attractiveness instead. She looks sexy but not-for-you. And why should she be "for you," with her five children? She looks like she likes to be sexy for her husband, and thus begins to fulfill damaged desires of many an American spouse of either gender.

I like it myself but I don't think it's real. I know no one her age, with a full-time job and five children, who looks like that; primarily because no one has the time, with all those commitments, to keep looking like that. Sarah Palin is at the age where stress and lack of sleep show on your face. It did on Meryl Streep; it did on Elizabeth Dole. There's a Dorian Gray quality to Palin's attractiveness that invites darker thoughts by those of us who have been there.

How do you get thin like that after 5 children? Not so easy. Regular exercise and diet? Doubtful. Bulimia? I would think so. The only other person I've ever known who was so perfectly, stylishly thin (and I lived in Los Angeles for a long time so I had plenty of people to observe) maintained her figure, and a million other secrets, by bulimia. Lovely young woman, but horribly conflicted, particularly about her own inability to handle her self-doubts without self-disgust.

Maybe it's not bulimia (and maybe it is) but these are the kind of thoughts that rise inevitably in your mind watching Sarah Palin in an interview -- control freak, manipulator, secret-keeper.

And then you watch the men around you fail to be uneasy, and you add a phrase, "man-eater," because it fits so well. Considering the world problems she has declared herself ready to resolve, she spends a wildly-disproportionate amount of time focused on disarming you instead, protecting herself, spreading her pheromones around the unnervingly large space she seems to need.

I can't help being catty. There's something wrong with this woman; and the worst thing about it is that so many people can't see it. She is just the one though to do a terrible amount of damage to the people around her before she does -- if this is even in the cards for her -- become aware of her willfulness and take stock of what it means.

In this she seems so much like John McCain, who survived terrible privations and did not learn from them what everyone else in the '60's learned: The Viet Nam war couldn't ever have been won, and one owed fidelity, especially after such sufferings, to the wife of one's youth.

If elected, what would these two do to make over the world in the image of their un-self-reflective dreams?

Fall of the Wall

2008-09-28T21:55:00.001-05:00

Street, that is. But will it be a Fall? or just another threat by the upper classes, another falsely-posed disaster from which the producing classes must somehow rescue them?

Pat Buchanan says the Baby Boomers did this, but he doesn't know those of us who walked through life with trepidation, the Viet Nam vets, the women who would have married them if they had survived, the casualties of wacky ideas about drugs or sex, the ones who faced the challenges of their young adulthood with wounds either overt or hidden. The Sixties were bad to some of us too.

There were so many of us, and then the women wanted things for themselves to count on and do. In all the envious screeds railing against us I never saw anyone say how harsh it was, in the '70's, for those of us with just ordinary passion while the Uber-Kompetitors left us in the inflationary dust.

As indeed they are leaving us today -- gold dust, I guess. They made their push for all of our money, dumping retirement entitlements, guilt-tripping us into private investments while they were devising ever more complicated ways of leveraging our savings toward profits that would put them forever beyond the reach of the human features that would take down the rest of us: Illness, children, children's illness, children's wars, famine, destruction of environments, the coarsening influence of a damaged world.

Now they have become so indispensable that the tax burdens of all the rest of us are required to keep their banks in place and trading ... instruments neither of us understands but at least we are willing to admit it.

I just don't believe it. I don't believe we cannot weather this threatened chaos and emerge stronger women and men. We have lost so much that gave us character. Wouldn't it be worth the risk of chaos to get it back? Wouldn't it be better to let the better-tailored sweat for a change, too? What the Founders created -- that the world cannot live without. What Wall Street made threatens instead to destroy it.

Dull Sublunary

2008-07-08T23:19:00.001-05:00

Such darkness.

The world since Brown v. Board of Education, the world of forced busing, white flight, urban underclass.

Not that I would keep it the same as it was before, but I regret the falling away of the neighborhood school, the ones the parents controlled with such confidence that they also came to love it and think of it as theirs. The outward emblem of the inward sense of autonomy.

People raising children deserve to control, and love, the means they choose to socialize their children. How many things have fallen apart since this social center came under attack? How many libraries, and local concert series, and service clubs, have shrunk down since those days called all local allegiance into question?

Can we really do without all of that?

Be careful who you blame for this though. You might think liberal social engineers were at fault for forcing this unnatural development, but I am more inclined to blame conservative hate.

No one should have put the neighborhood school at risk like that. There is so little that can take its place.

And no one would have had to if conservatives had fought more battles with themselves. The hate was always repugnant, and they let it be.

Even "Let it be" can have a dark inner core. That is what is illuminated when the sun is, for a time, missing.

Mausoleum Politics

2008-06-08T14:21:00.002-05:00

It's odd what a struggle it is to handle money.

I have a house full of possessions that I find impossible to display, hard to dust and difficult to store with any confidence. In a life-time that spanned the last half of the 20th century, I often sought to inventory everything -- one is told you need that if insurance is going to pay after a theft. I was too busy living though. Cataloguing is a hobby, and not my favorite at that.

For me fortunately shopping was also something that never got done either. So the pace of accumulation has slowed, and the items to be stored has gotten slowly older and easier to cull.

There aren't that many photos. I hated the stage-y-ness of photo ops as a child and lacked the funds for a good camera when I got older. I was also pretty sure I would lose one if I had it -- distractible, caught up in the moment, and confident of an overly vivid memory.

I under-estimated the depredations of age. My memory, really, is in great shape but there's so much more to think about than I anticipated. The details of moments of happiness apparently are less significant to me than the deadlines and telephone numbers I need to remember in the present. The old details, and the colors in the views I tried to memorize -- they've failed me. I think they're still in there. There's a palpable current of pleasure when I close my eyes at night; night has the reruns and though I don't remember dreams very often, I can tell that mine are wonderful.

In short, I remember that I used to remember, but a young person's vivid views won't be back in detail unless I find a cheap Kodak of the moment somewhere, and that is increasingly unlikely. Sixty years of life is a long time; everything fades.

Which leaves the question of why everyone's house is so jam-packed with goods, under-used and overly dusty, a sad burden on the sense of a purposeful existence. Why is that?

My thought is that it's death we're all postponing and lack of significance that is wearing us down. Those possessions are hostages to fate. You'd think, as such we'd be relieved to be done with them, but we're not. Secretly we're planning to throw them to the hound Cerberus when he comes calling at last. Maybe my classic vinyl rock albums will placate him; maybe not.

On the political playing field, there's a related illusion, kind of a paperhanger's trick: If we can assemble a nation of mansions and goods, pave the earth from sea to sea with a chemical brew that shows our dominance and evicts the bugs and the viruses -- It is surely a facade but the illusion is that it's not. That what you build will protect you; and to build biggest of all is to be invulnerable.

To say this things is to realize how laughable they are. Problem is that we still act as if they are true. My secular friends are fond of asking what it IS with God (the Judaeo-Christian one, as traditionally understood) that He is so insistent on primacy in our lives. Why can't Art, or Family, or Achievement properly be primary? Why does God have to be first? What egoism is that?

When we show we can refrain from believing in illusions, then these cavils might make sense. God I think is perplexed at why we don't like the message He sent: He's a better God than the ones we make, and we always make them. It's what we do.

Don't believe me? Convince me that the McMansion, the photo albums and the electronified gadgets are chosen for rational reasons and I'll tell you you're ready to have no false gods. Till it's easy to give up these crutches, I'm in for the count with an old-fashioned God who identifies himself as the only reliable crutch, and then adjures me to walk without it in my hand.

Free-fall might just be the only right condition for a man.

I see you!

2008-04-07T16:02:00.000-05:00

I wonder whether George W. Bush has the chops to scorn anyone these days?

It was my misfortune to listen to the current President speak to the New York Economic Club a few weeks ago. How curious the silence as he spoke forth the lines that in a partisan crowd would have drawn applause! Indeed the economic world was crashing down around the economists that day – it was a particularly bad day in a bad year at the end of a bad administration. But it’s George Bush’s economy too and his speech still was drafted with pauses for applause. Even the ideologues were silent.

My point though was about scorn. One aspect of this speech was that Bush again traveled the well-trodden road of contempt for the bankruptcy process. Now I gave up my personal livelihood (used to be a consumer bankruptcy attorney) in 2006 in response to this scorn so I know that it is not just an emotion or a sound byte. Perhaps it is unrealistic, these days, to suggest that the President owes a decent respect to his subjects, but the truth is that scorn for bankruptcy judges is not something George Bush is qualified to exhibit.

The issue was the foreclosure crisis aspect of the larger sub-prime lending crisis. There are so many aspects to this crisis that the mind boggles at the task of attaining perspective. In confidence, however, that the Bush administration will exert itself appropriately (or more) in the interests of wealthy investors, let me take a moment to defend the group he won’t recur to in this, the extremis of eight years of his economic policies.

Bankruptcy judges actually know how this economy works. Every day they see the flotsam and jetsam, and the occasional bleeding amputations, that our economy generates. It is not by all means the financial equivalent of Welfare Queens out there. We’ve got the feckless and abusive, but we’ve also got the hard-working and naive out there obtaining their discharges. In the business courts is a higher calibre of intellect on both sides of the Notice of Bankruptcy Filing. Perhaps there it’s harder, since everyone is so well-dressed, to notice that even the creditors have made mistakes or they wouldn’t be in Bankruptcy Court either, but the savage American impulses to deny reality, fake success and mobilize economic power to crush the wounded could hardly be in better display than in Bankruptcy Court.

As Federal judgeships fill up with partisan appointees rather than the best business lawyers, it’s really possible that the only people who know how the U.S. economy functions actually are the bankruptcy judges, or at least those among them who are not yet infected with the meretricious fantasy that the bankrupt of this culture created their own dilemmas with primarily moral failings.

To recur to my original point, George Bush miscarries his own economic salvation when he rejects the aid of the bankruptcy courts in resolving the foreclosure crisis. Since 1979 Chapter 13 of the Bankruptcy Code has been a laboratory of the possibilities of change for the embattled middle class. No one wants to really engage the issue, but the truth is that some of the foreclosure problem is the result of unwise speculation and some of it is the victimization of the middle class by their better-dressed betters. To resolve the crisis requires discretion – separating the people who deserve help from the ones who don’t and then delivering the assistance.

When George Bush scorns his own judiciary as helpers in this struggle he reveals again what many have felt for a very long time: The problems of little people have no value to the government these days. People of the social class of George Bush, and people that aspire to it, have loftier goals. What I used to think of as my life work – helping little people think their way out of big problems – isn’t an arena in which there are global rewards. The problems are solvable and the techniques can be learned but no one in power has cared about them for a very long time. In scorning the assistance of the bankruptcy judges, our President has made this clear once again.

I’m guessing no one else is going to say this, because that’s not how the global game is played, but I’m still a locally-based American, to whom the welfare of my countrymen really does matter, and I have one message for the powerful who believe no one has noticed their shift of allegiances: I see you.

[ I wonder how the Federal housing administration is doing, trying to process the applications of desperate homeowners? When I first opened my practice in 1996, they put one client through a bizarrely-protracted 8-month evaluation process which ultimately bottomed on the reef that this first-time homeowner ran very few expenses through an actual bank account and wasn’t able, therefore, to fully document his monthly grocery expenditures during the year, two years previous, in which his wife spent the mortgage money on drugs. There was a program but help was denied. I still know the man. The help, had it been granted, would have been enough. ]

[ And a book remains to be written about how George H.W. Bush paid his sons’ ways out of the Savings and Loan Crisis and the more personal dilemmas they got themselves into. I object to the rich buying for their children freedom from the natural economic consequences of market failures, especially when justice is bought off in the process. None of these people have standing to object to the poor man doing the same thing for himself in bankruptcy court. ]

More Weather

2006-09-17T15:31:00.002-05:00

The wheel has turned again. The air is
a little thinner, with winter
advancing out of the North. Crippled he may be
but always dark,

and quite a curse, as a visitor. He opens your cupboards,
and notes what is threadbare,
the holes in your sweater,
some stumbling when you walk;

Not the cat you once were.

I will set a hearth for him. I will cook a fine stew
and yet I note --
this year I hesitated.

Comment on the Weather

2006-08-11T22:34:00.002-05:00

The moon is on her journey south again,
in the middle of the valley again.
It's a cold August and the birds are loud --

When did the summer pass?

I should make a choice or two. The options are
thin. I thought I had more of them.

I'm thinking tonight that it doesn't matter if I don't choose soon; it will come soon enough,
the consequence.

I can squander some clock time,
admire the moon rhyme
hold myself back tonight.

It's Alive!

2005-10-19T00:05:00.001-05:00

Someone's still alive down there!

Bankruptcy Judge Lamar Davis in South Georgia issued a General Order yesterday that the unconstitutional part of the new law doesn't apply to lawyers. That cures the unconstitutionality problem!

Finally someone in the right place, with the right power, at the right time, saw a need to act out his personal responsibility.

I could live with the law being punitive and burdensome but it sucking the oxygen away from my life force to think of serving under a law that was UNCONSTITUTIONAL. I feel like I can breathe again. I may live.

Brown Dreams in N'Auleans

2005-10-02T16:22:00.001-05:00

How small-government conservatives live with themselves:

Let me record the televised moment I knew what kind of a man ex-FEMA Chief Micheal D. Brown is:

He gets asked, at the Congressional hearings, "What did you do wrong?"

That's the cue to either be candid, of course, or to finesse it all and, as politicians do, answer a different question.

So he seems to choose candor -- lowers voice, looks straight at questioner, looks a little pained: "My mistake is ...

Really, he almost wins you just by the humble role he chooses right here ...

"My mistake was [ I couldn't overcome how ]... Blanco & Nagin screwed it up."

NO NO NO

Either you accuse -- with an entirely different approach, anger-fed -- or you accept the blame, "I couldn't get it up to get anything done on my own."

How candor works is: The style fits the content. Brown's content was "Lousiana is dysfunctional"; his style was "I am here to accept responsibilty."

Liar.

It's often dangerous to give a real, line-responsibility job to a lawyer [or alternatively a teacher, similar dynamics sometimes] who has spent a lifetime second-guessing other people's decisions and little else. Some of these "intellectual workers" never get any clue that some people's jobs require actual results.

I think that is at the root of Brown's problem, in unholy alliance with Bush & Rove's radical small government goals.

I do feel a little bit sorry for him. I imagine he's gone through a whole lifetime without noticing that some people have to put out real effort at work.

The Other Shoe Drops; or One of Them

2005-09-23T10:42:00.001-05:00

The other shoe drops, or one of them.

New Orleans mayor Nagin is not looking so dumb anymore after Houston tries to evacuate and manages mostly to create gridlock and suck all the gasoline out of the area.

I bet you dollars to doughnuts Nagin was driven to his decisions in part by intuitive awareness of how impossible it is to evacuate a major city completely. Maybe the wind will pass and lives (as in that exploding bus outside Houston) not be lost in the process of evacuation, plus looting of houses left behind by the criminals of a notably lawless city.

Not the best thinking but no excuse for FEMA officials to suck thumbs, confident that picking up the pieces was primarily a "local responsibility."

First responders, yeah right. What about the Second Responders? Who, before Bush and Karl Rove,thought no one else had any obligation???

It can't be new to anyone in America -- anyone who knows history that is -- that one of the functions of the Federal government is to handle things that the States screw up, or that are too big for local imaginations. Lots of brain trust and broader vision are needed to run a giant nation, and perhaps these aren't even the skills that a local politician needs. These folks go to Washington, get power ... and owe the rest of us as a moral obligation of repayment.

For most of our history, the Federal government has had a true intuition that it has a backstop-and/or-reform role. It's needed and it has been carried out just for that reason.

The fly in the ointment has been that the rich and capable have mixed emotions about any sense of responsibility for this function of government. I have no idea why they think they could function as well as they do if they didn't have a huge, and heavily-government-supported economy and social structure behind them, assuring the predictability of the world in which they make big money. I don't know why they can't see that most of the world is not like this, much less predictable and harder to get wealthy in without direction corruption and violence.

Most likely, to see it that way would undermine their sense of personal achievement.

But it's true. The Federal government is a huge part of the conditions that create super-wealth in this country and the passion to limit taxation represents the bad faith of many of the rich who want the benefits of this but not the bill.

Local is never enough to support any richesse but that of the local warlord -- the real kind, with guns, goons and jus primae noctis.

You want super-wealth on the American scale, you pay some taxes, buddy ... or you lose not only New Orleans but everything else that underlies your satisfying sense of personal competence.

2005-09-18T13:28:00.000-05:00

Things fall apart.

Not that I am unsympathetic to the individuals who create these awful results, sometimes unwittingly, but it's not just the bankruptcy system that is not functioning as well as Americans expect their systems to function!

[ Technical correction: The bankruptcy system still is functioning reputably, given the messes we are charged to deal with. For another month, till the new law comes into effect, it will continue to do so. Its death thereafter is planned, statutorial and [ apparently ] will be enforced by the Department of Justice. Not dead yet, though! ]

What can we say about the airlines however?

I don't know the source of the problem. Maybe someone can illuminate. Here however is the shape of the problem:

Flying United has been a mistake for a while. Staff are under TERRIBLE stress. The useless baggage agent we had REFUSED to give her name, which sent my traveling companion ballistic. Lost luggage; a 3/4 hour delay before they told a LARGE GROUP of us what happened. Before that, there was one agent, a huge line, no information and a crowd milling in the baggage claim area.

Time frame of these observations: over a year ago. We no longer fly them because, at that time, at O'Hare, United made NO attempt to match luggage to specific flights. They consider your luggage delivered if it arrives on either the flight before or the flight after yours to the same city. So we got in about 12:30 to miss the SF rush hour; luggage didn't arrive till 2:45; after shuttling to parking we were in the heart of the rush hour.

I can't imagine that the terrorists haven't figured this out either.

Homeland Security hadn't; what else is new? Their emphasis is on deletion of the words "probable cause" from public discourse.

We've flown on American, AirTran, Midwest and several other smaller carriers with dramatically better results. Delightful in fact.

Northwest has been bad for even longer. Actually, they've been an unhappy corporation for so long that I still will occasionally use
them. It's like a dysfunctional marriage with great powers of endurance; you can get some good out of it. I had a gate agent recently, when I was close to shock after a medical emergency, who had problem-solving skills and personal kindness of the highest order.

IT'S STILL AMERICA, but a lot is wrong and I don't understand why it can't get fixed.

2005-09-18T07:42:00.000-05:00

My mother's best friend died yesterday.

Unexpected heart attack in a vigorous woman of 65. Actually, a very sweet woman, active, helpful. How do we do without these people?

I wonder if I'm just being too emotional [ again ], but this seems to reflect on the more objective question of the day yesterday -- how evil is the Department of Justice, really?

Wrong-headed enthusiasm for prosecution is by no means a DOJ specialty. Sometimes it's just a risk that comes with prosecutorial territory.

Just because it's systemic, and encouraged by the Social Misperception of the Month -- do I really get to call it evil?

Yeah, I do. It's powered by a social theory that ungoverned competition makes us better -- us being those that survive the competition, of course; and most of the competitors usually do survive. Anyway, we're so shocked when they don't! No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Looking at my profession from the eye of this hurricane, I think I see the intention to destroy my profession, to employ market forces and the litigation powers of the Sovereign to create another perfect storm (think: 9/11; think Iraq; think Katrina; think consumer bankruptcy lawyers trying, like sheep, to learn the new law while their government prepares to prosecute them for failures, intentional or not).

Intentions, aside -- retooling is expensive. How many times have I done it in the last few years, every time someone better paid than me decided that reform was necessary.

This is what I do for a living. Can I afford to be reformed again?

Good, sweet people die every day. Sometimes you don't realize what pain you caused them before you hear the news. And then it all looks small in comparison.

My profession is looking thin, very thin, anorexic in comparison with the mortality we all share.

2005-09-17T16:41:00.000-05:00

I'm a consumer bankruptcy attorney who spoke recently at a training session for the local bankruptcy bar.

I volunteered, realizing for the last few months that I had to learn the new law, the [ laughably so-called ] Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 signed into law in April and effective on October 17.

Let me simply say, it's a poorly-drafted a statute as can be imagined. Not that it isn't full of detail, deadlines and demands but, after 8 years in Congress before passage, no one [ apparently ] tried very hard to make it either easy or elegant or effective to use.

Any writer could accurately deduce from this that Congress held in contempt the poor and financially inept whom they regulate in this law, and also the lawyers of the inept, whom they regulated [ arguably ] worse.

* * *

Like the good soldier I am, I prepared for my speech by focusing on the nuts and bolts that people will have to know to make the law work. Can't complain about the results if you don't put in the work to learn how the new system functions. Etc. I put in the time.

Like the good citizen I am, I assumed fundamentally good intentions from Congress. Oh those Congresspersons, and the credit card companies for which they stand, despise me and people like me, but they have their reasons. It's a democracy and people-like-me lost this battle. In a democracy, you are required to respect the views of others, at least up to the point you know they are powered more by malice [ in the medieval Latin sense of malizia, which is bad faith in the existentialist sense ].

Some other presenters though tackled the even more offensive parts, the actual restrictions on consumer bankruptcy attorneys.

I'd avoided reading those; I don't like to be told what to do. I was working up to it.

Imagine my surprise when I found that the Department of Justice, although fully aware that the changes may force debtor attorneys out of business on purely economic grounds [ the changes in required practice being that expensive to implement ] ... said that the Department of Justice is enthusiastic about suing the attorneys to establish, by litigation, the interpretations of the more poorly written, ambiguous clauses.

In case non-lawyers [ or persons accustomed to getting regular paychecks either for that matter ] miss the nuance -- when you regularly get poorly paid by poor people and then get sued by the Department of Justice too, you must defend yourself against its regularly-paid lawyers at your own expense and it can ruin you.

On top of that, DOJ is toying with the idea that one of the less-well-written phrases in the new law restricts the content of the legal advice that can be given to poor people-- a gag rule. There is a exception for advisers to the wealthy-and financially-inept. When assisting the wealthy, you can discuss any and all strategies with them but some strategies must be concealed from the poor ....

To be fair, this isn't a done deal yet. I believe the Speaker brought it up as a form of argument called "in terrorem" -- that is, to create by fear a result [ in this case, a gag rule ] that cannot be compelled by the law.

If you believe in America, now would be a good time to be afraid [ as if New Orleans wasn't warning enough ].