Happy Fourth!

You really have to wonder what exactly that means: happy Fourth! I am a perennial nay-sayer when it comes to these flag-waving holidays. We have two religious, or I should say, formerly religious holidays: Christmas (which is now Santa and an orgy of materialism) and Easter (bunnies, little chickies, and an orgy of materialism). We have three flag-waving holidays: Memorial Day, July 4, and Veterans Day. The first and the third of these are basically about glorifying our wars, and they essentially are about the same thing. Hurrah for all the guys--our guys, not the guys they killed and maimed--who got sent to war and were either killed there, maimed there, or got out of it alive in some form or fashion. Today we are celebrating the basic America-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-world-day. Everybody knows this. Why, we invented freedom and equality. And we have sent our men and women all over the world to die for freedom and equality, and by God, we should celebrate what wonderful people we are.

My life span has basically witnessed my country involved in one war after another. I was born during World War II, Korea before I was ten, Vietnam, a whole series of interventions during the 80s and 90s (Grenada, Panama, Bosina, etc.), the Cold War which spanned 1946-90, Afghanistan, Iraq. And waiting the wings: Syria, and who the hell knows next? Facing such a history, basically the trajectory of empire, we do what every empire before us did: we glorify our conquests. We brand anybody who ever wore or now wears a military uniform a "hero" and fall over ourselves glorifying them and their bloody trade.

My life span also witnessed people being lynched and murdered in my section of the country because they stood up for simple basic human rights and dignity, much less the rights supposedly guaranteed in our Constitution.

So, sorry, I cannot wave the flag. I cannot not see how we lie to ourselves as a country, how we fail to see what's plain: we're no better than people we hate, no better than our allies or enemies. It really just makes me sad: this orgy of patriotism. I forget who it was now who said "Patriotism is the last refuge of scondrals," but it's a statement worth pondering.

Whitman Leavings

The following is from the preface of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a collection of his poems that grew ever larger through numerous further editions.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

A remarkable statement, don't you think, for the middle of the Victorian age? Whitman's been called the quintessential American poet. Yes, that may be, but can you feature most Americans today being thrilled by these words? Most of these injunctions would be regarded as the ravings of some lunatic socialist. Must be why I find them so strangely powerful.  

46 Years

Today Susan and I celebrate 46 years of marriage. Three grown children; two lost very early in their lives; two grandchildren; several major changes of vocations and life venues; our share of marital crises, arguments, and pains--and amidst them we'd often construe them as considerably more than our share--here we are. Still discovering each other, still in love with each other, still amazed at what love has wrought in our lives, still looking forward to more years together. Because we know that the essential grounding to what's real that we share in our love for one another will only grow.

We've long past the point where our consciousness of being melded into the other is palpable, where we know (sometimes, lots of times) what the other will say or think before the words express it. And yet we remain for one another the essential mystery of life. We're past the point of thinking about the might-have-beens. Those are for people who haven't gotten here yet. Of course, there are regrets, but all of mine are about hurts I've caused, things I wish I could undo or unsay. But I don't wonder, as once I might have, if somehow I could have more of Susan's love had I not hurt her. Don't wonder at all because I know I'm loved by this other person as much as she can love anybody. Because I'm so secure in her forgiveness and she in mine. That's the way this works.

I cannot help but believe there's something utterly otherworldly about the power of human love. It's a glimpse into another reality where we long to reside all the time. Like everything else in life, though, we cannot grasp it and keep it, that glimpse. We see Reality but we can't hold it. We're always pulled away.

I love you, Susan. I always have. I always will. What more can be said?

"Bad News!" . . . as in "Bad Dog!"

The article under discussion starts like this:

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-colored candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be.

Now, I don't know what to say about this. All my life I've been a news junkie. I can't get through the day without knowing what's going on, I read editorials and commentary incessantly, and I look forward to watching the PBS news every weekday. But I have to confess I have not been happy with the way news is gone, particularly mass media news, over the past 20 years. More and more mindless. Ever more dumbed down. Fluff, celebrities, so-called "human interest" stories, and thin thinking. I've even begun to be disgruntled with the PBS news, which I think is following the larger trend, although they're a great pains to deny it.

Here the catalog of sins committed by the news media according to this piece which makes it unprofitable if not to say discomforting to read the news and especially follow it on TV.

• News misleads: Car drives of the bridge, bridge collapses. Focus of the news: the car and the person, not the structural integrity of the bridge, which is the real news. "News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.
• News is irrelevant: Name one article out of 10,000 or so that you watched or read last year that helped you make a better decision about some serious thing affecting your life, job, or career. Can't do it. But media organizations try to convince you that if you don't know the news, you are at some sort of disadvantage. Lots of people fall for this. We get anxious when the cut off from the flow of news. "In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have."
• News has no explanatory power: accumulating facts will not help you understand the world. "The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that developed below the journalists' radar but have a transformative effect. The more "news factoids" you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand."
• News is toxic to your body: the bottom line here is bad news, panicky stories increase your stress level, and since that's just about the only kind of news there is, the stress is chronic. There are number of other baleful effects. Read the piece.
• News increases cognitive errors: "News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias in the words of Warren Buffet: 'What a human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.' News exacerbates this flaw.' also exacerbates another cognitive error, story bias. We want stories to make sense, even when they don't correspond to reality. The "news" always explains stories so they make sense, and unrealistic and cheap way of explaining the world.
• News inhibits thinking: "Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. Not only does news make us shallow thinkers but worse, it severely affects our memory. anything we want to remember has to pass through the long-range memory/short term memory choke point in our brains. "If this passageway is disrupted, nothing gets through. Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension."
• News works like a drug: This is really scary, and I've noticed the symptoms myself. "His stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientist used to think that the dense connections formed among the hundred billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time he reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to absorb lengthy articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It's not because they get older or their schedules become more onerous. It's because the physical structure of their brains has changed."
• News wastes time: Think about it. How much time every day do you spend snatching this piece of news or that piece of news? And then the distraction and the refocus time. How much does it add up to? Probably more than half a day a week.
• News makes us passive: You cannot influence things you learn in news stories. Their daily repetition makes us passive. "It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitize, sarcastic, and fatalistic."
• News kills creativity: things we already know limit our creativity. If you want to come up with all solutions, read news. If you're looking for new solutions, don't.

The author of the article ends with this paragraph: "I have now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it."

I'm not at all sure that I can do this. I'm afraid I'm hooked like a druggie on news, and I have been all my life. But I've noticed and worried about my shortened attention span, my lessening ability to focus, my impatience with long reads. Not good. Not good at all.

Don't know if weaning off news is possible. But I sure would like to give it a try. Monday's coming, start of a new news week. Hmmmmmm.

Someone Was Murdered, Take 1

Susan and I have a just right-sized retirement house. No room wasted. So my "Boss" chair and ottoman is located in living/TV room. It's where I read the morning paper. Well, since the George Zimmerman trial has started, Susan's been watching it and by osmosis, if not by interest--and I cannot deny there has been more than some of that on my part--I have absorbed a good bit of the court proceedings in Florida. The American legal process is something to behold in its nitty gritty. The prosecution's star witnesses, a 19-year old girl named Rachel Jeantel, daughter of a Haitian immigrant mother and father from Santo Domingo, spent the better part of two grueling days of testimony most of it from the defense attorney about the conversation she had with Treyvon Martin on the night he shot to death in Sanford, Florida.

You will recall that she was on the phone with Treyvon Martin as he was being followed by George Zimmerman and at the early part of the confrontation between them. It is amazing to me that a lawyer can ask the same questions of the same witness numerous times before finally (and mercifully for the viewers and the witness) the judge puts a halt to it. To me, it was perfectly obvious that the defense lawyer was trying to catch her in an inconsistency. One slip, not answering the same question precisely the same way, and he would pounce.

Rachel Jeantel under the gun, Zimmerman trial, Sanford FL, June 27, 2013

It was relentless. Over and over, the same question. And not just two or three times. Eight, ten times. If it had been me, the lawyer would have probably gotten under my thin skin pretty quickly, and I would have been snappish if not downright confrontational after answering the same question two or three times. I personally thought she held up really well under the barrage, but her irritation was at times palpable. I remarked to Susan that this black teenager proved to be every bit the equal of the powerful white, beautifully manicured, impeccably spoken lawyer. She is not highly educated (she's a ghetto black teen, for Pete's sake), she doesn't speak the king's English, but she's not stupid. She refused to be tricked, refused to have words put into her mouth, refused to let her dead friend be blamed for his own death. She knew what she heard on the phone, and she knew what it meant. The bottom line here is: somebody got murdered, and this trial is about holding that murderer to account.

There's a flood of commentary about this witness out there. Here's a sample:

The Nation
The Raw Story
Salon
Time
Media-ite

Accent, Great! Sentiments, Better!

I do wish I could embed this video. I've tried for a little while to size it properly to play in the blog and I cannot do it. Therefore I'm forced to post just the link, which adds a layer of inconvenience to your getting to see this. Her name is Clare Daly and she's a member of the Irish Parliament, and she's got some trenchant words for our commander-in-chief. The kind of thing you're not going to ever hear on the floors of the Congress.

Before I forget, here's the link. (Whaddya know? As I was putting this up, I figured out how to embed the video. So how's that for convenience?)


She's upset about the hypocrisy of the American president on several scores, most of them having to do with his ever pious protestations about peace. I cannot say that I'm not similarly disgusted.

Killing the University

The title of the piece is "How the American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps." And it's appalling of course. I forget at this point exactly how I ran across this. But the subject always trips my trigger, so I thought I'd tell you about too. It's a long read, as these things go, but worth it, I think. Not only to get the argument, but to get it from the perspective of a guy named who's truly been victimized by the state of affairs . . . he's an adjunct professor somewhere, by definition overworked and grossly underpaid, and further a person devoted to learning and the life of the mind. This last description of course in this society designates him as somebody pretty much useless for any "productive" role in the economy. I was astonished to learn not long ago that 75 percent of the teaching faculty in American colleges and universities are temps and adjuncts. But upon reflection, I had to realize: but of course. It would have to be this way, given what the premise of the article is. That the American University is already dead.

Here's the way the argument runs, the five steps:

1. First, you defund public education
2. Second, you deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
3. Step #3: You move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university. 
4.  Step Four: You move in corporate culture and corporate money
5. Destroy the students

Obviously, all of these are filled out in considerable detail, but I want to highlight only the last "destroy the students." Let me quote:

This is accomplished through a two-prong tactic: you dumb down and destroy the quality of the education so that no one on campus is really learning to think, to question, to reason. Instead, they are learning to obey, to withstand “tests” and “exams”, to follow rules, to endure absurdity and abuse. Our students have been denied full-time available faculty, the ability to develop mentors and advisors, faculty-designed syllabi which changes each semester, a wide variety of courses and options. Instead, more and more universities have core curriculum which dictates a large portion of the course of study, in which the majority of classes are administrative-designed “common syllabi” courses, taught by an army of underpaid, part-time faculty in a model that more closely resembles a factory or the industrial kitchen of a fast food restaurant than an institution of higher learning.

The Second Prong:  You make college so insanely unaffordable that only the wealthiest students from the wealthiest of families can afford to go to the school debt free. Younger people may not know that for much of the 20th Century many universities in the U.S. were free – including the CA state system – you could establish residency in six months and go to Berkeley for free, or at very low cost. When I was an undergraduate student in the mid to late 1970s, tuition at Temple University was around $700 a year. Today, tuition is nearly $15,000 a year. Tuitions have increased, using CA as an example again, over 2000% since the 1970s. 2000%! This is the most directly dangerous situation for our students: pulling them into crippling debt that will follow them to the grave.

Under this same general rubric, he also alleges an unholy alliance between the leading lending istitutions, our friends the big banks, and university financial aid departments, a "shady partnership" developing between them. After we've learn what else these banks have done, can we truly doubt that they've got their greedy tentacles around this victim too? 

Speaking of Dying

I read that there's been another example of "guns don't kill people, people kill people." It's not surprising to me that the incident takes place in Tennessee, a state renowned for its progressive views on just about any subject as long as it's barbeque or the UT Vols. Here's the scenario: a married couple, she's 26 and he's 40, are struggling over a loaded handgun--won wonders if the winner of the struggle got to shoot the other one?--with their six-month old baby at their feet. You know the rest. The gun went off and killed the baby. Both of the parents are in jail under a $1million bond apiece, and charged with reckless homicide. We also learn that both of these sterling citizens have extensive criminal records.

I cannot help but wonder what can possibly be going through these people's minds? Do they even have a mind in the commonly understood sense of the term?

But of one thing we can be sure, and we do know the answer: everyday tragedies like this won't have the slightest effect on our insane gun laws that make crimes like this inevitable every single day.

A Richly Distorted View

A couple of interesting studies out of the University of California, Berkley. Both of them, here and here, indicate that the richer you are, the less likely you are to behave in certain fundamental areas than the rest of us. One study says you're less likely to have empathy for your fellow humans. Another study indicates a certain predisposition to unethical behavior the richer you are. I don't need to tell you that these findings are controversial, but I ask you consult your experience on this. Of course, I can't tell you about your experience, but I can tell you I have no trouble believing the first of these propositions. A junky car with a working class guy is much more likely to stop and help you on the road than a Beamer or Lexus. Watch what kind of people give to beggars on street corners or cripples on the sidewalk. Again, it's been my experience that it's not the rich people who first step up here.

Here's a quote from the second study: "Studies conducted by psychology professor Paul Piff found those who drive luxury cars were less likely to stop for pedestrians, those with more money were more likely take candy from children, and the wealthiest among us were more likely to cheat in a game with a $50 cash prize."

I leave it to you as to what to make of these matters. But evidence also exists that these reactions are rooted in the situation, not the personality. If the rich get poorer, they tend to take on the characteristics of the poor and vice versa. Hmmmmm.

Livin' and Dyin'

"See ya, Dutch."

Yeah, I know it's a serious question that's engaged the philosophers, theologians, and other serious thinkers for as long as people have been able to think about the subject. And I hasten to assure you that I'm not about to delve into that subject right now, although I will admit to some fascination with the discussion. No, I'm going to talk about something only slightly less portentous as real life and death, and that's living and dying with a baseball team. It's next to impossible to explain this phenomenon to anybody who isn't a hard core fan of some baseball team. Forget football, basketball, hockey, and all those other sports that intrude on baseball season and claim to be of equal stature. That's another argument, and I'm not gonna talk about it either.

What I'm talking about is having the pace and general tenor of your life being shaped and influenced by the fortunes of your baseball team, whichever one it is. Unless of course you love the Yankees, in which case you deserve the sufferings of hell for loving the spawn of the Devil. A win for the day defines a good day, a loss, a really not so good day. If it's All-Star break or your team's got a day off or it's a travel day, everything is OK . . . unless there's been some intervening disaster. Like a major guy going on the disabled list (DL) or several major guys being on it at one time, or getting hammered by somebody, or losing to the Yankees. Or a losing streak. Which is what I'm talking about here.

All of my ten or dozen regular readers know that I live or die with the Texas Rangers, and tonight they lost their sixth game in a row, all of them in their home park. The gory details are not important. Suffice it to say that all of a sudden the bats have gone on vacation and the pitching is stinking up the place. The picture above is of Ranger manager Ron Washington taking the ball from leftie Derrek Holland, usually a reliable starter, who's on his way out of the game. Like other Rangers in the four-game series with the Toronto Blue Jays, he got lit up, but the guy after him, Kyle McClellan, was worse and let the game get totally away.

Six games lost in a row is like having a really rotten cold that will not go away . . . and you have no hope that it will any time soon. Know how I found that picture? I googled "baseball losing streak." A whole bunch of Ranger pix came up. That, my friends, is no bueno.