La noche de los santos mexicanos

The New York Thruway on Boxing Day, or as it is properly called elsewhere, St. Stephen’s Day.

The snow hit at about 4 in the afternoon. The traffic slowed. 60, 50, 30, then 15 miles an hour. By five it was dark, so at least the whiteout could no longer be seen. The cars crept along, following each other’s tread marks in the mounting piles of snow. 5 miles an hour. Next Exit: 8 miles.

Then we stopped.

After a while people got out of their cars to see what the hold-up was. The ghostly blinking of red brake lights far ahead, the howling wind, the driving snow. Aside from the garishly lit three lanes of our southbound expressway, with its hundreds of headlights forming a ribbon of intermittent brilliance, all around was blackness. There was no way of knowing what had happened.

An hour passed.

Every ten minutes or so you had to get out of your car and wipe away the snow and ice from the windshield and bang the wipers free of frozen slush. Then back in the car, with the heat turned up to full blast on the window, in the futile hope of keeping a clear field of vision.

Another hour.

The radio did and did not help. The AM news stations were too terrifying. Already stories of abandoned cars and stranded travelers were being breathlessly reported. Repeated warnings: stay at home, do not drive. The FM proved a little better. A good reggae show calmed the nerves as the car rocked in the bitter blasts of wind. Then it was over, too soon, followed by some inane talk show. A flip of the dial. Country. No. Oldies. No. Hate radio. No. Christian. Definitely not. A search of the glove compartment yielded a few cds left there by my teenage daughter. What the hell. I slipped one in.

It was now eight o’clock. Off to my right, in the middle lane, a pick-up truck danced crazily, trying to gain some traction. It rocked, fishtailed, but could not advance.

Uh-oh.

I put my car into first. Gently played the clutch and gas pedal. Then went into reverse. Then back to first. Reverse. First. Reverse. First… Nothing.

I was stuck. We had been immobile too long, the snow was too deep.

Outside again to clear the windshield, I could hear over the roar of the wind the high-pitched, mocking whine of wheels spinning uselessly. Dim figures were digging, shoveling, pushing, a long line of ants busy in their desperation.

Back to the warmth and the music. Yes, Avril Lavigne, you have lots of problem, but so do I.

A third hour passed. I closed my eyes. Forget about the damn windshield. I directed the heat to my soaking feet. I dozed. I had a full tank of gas. What, me worry?

A sharp rap to my left. I hit a button. Miraculously, the power window still worked. It slid down all the way, snow cascaded into my lap.

A man was standing there. Fortyish. Short, stocky, with kind eyes.

“Señor. I help. Later.”

Then he was gone.

The torpor vanished. Outside again, to tend to the windshield too long neglected. The scraper struck thick ice. Scrabbling at it bare-handed, pounding the wipers. At last it was clean.

Ahead, at a distance of about ten car lengths, a riot of flashing lights. I trudged up the road to see what it was.

A garbage truck turned tow truck. Turned snow plow.

Yes!

It had grabbed a few tractor trailers from the middle and outside lanes and hauled them to the inside lane, which it had just plowed. They rumbled away, the first forward movement any of us had seen for three hours.

A half-hour later the traffic in the inside lane inched ahead. The middle lane turned into a scramble of determined bedlam, as passengers pushed, dug, pushed, to move the few precious feet onto the cleared lane.

We, in the outside lane, dug and clawed at the snow that had drifted in front of our tires. Escape was twenty very long feet away.

“Señor.”

It was him again. He held out a shovel, looking with amusement at my soaking red Vancouver Olympics mittens.

I dug a notional path for my tires toward the middle lane. Straight, no fancy turns.

The two hundred or so cars in the inside lane had all passed. The middle lane was emptying, slowly.

Another hour. But no one paid any attention to the blizzard now.

At last came our turn. I saw my man two cars up. Must not lose him.

I joined him and another man pushing a grey sedan. Two women finally got out of the back seat to help. Laughter.

“Dominicanas,” my friend explained.

They were off.

The three of us returned to the car ahead of mine, a black BMW. More rapid-fire conversation.

“¿Dominicanos?” I ventured.

“Mexicanos,” came the reply.

My guy and I pushed and pushed. Instructions were shouted. “¡Ahora!” “¡Otro lado!” “¡Atrás!”

The BMW swerved, slid, screamed, then finally found purchase and rolled forward. Across the middle lane and then, at last, onto the inside. It moved off, its red lights disappeared into the night.

There were very few of us left on the road. I turned to my friend.

“¿Tu coche?”

He nodded in the direction behind my car. At a distance of about thirty feet, his white SUV stood athwart the middle lane, ready to roll. He could leave right now.

We looked at each other. He smiled reassuringly.

The man was a saint.

We dug some more. He took the wheel, I pushed. No movement.

The shovels again.

“You guys getting out?”

A state trooper was slowly cruising along the inside lane.

“We need help,” I shouted. “One more man to push!”

“Right,” he said in a friendly manner. Then he drove off.

We turned back to my forlorn Passat. More pushing, grunting, spinning.

Then another person was beside me. The BMW guy!

“I park,” he explained.

Another saint.

The car inched forward ever so slightly.

The first saint got out. The two Mexicans discussed matters for a moment. Apparently, it was decided that the BMW man would drive.

From that moment on, things happened very quickly. The driver was an expert. He rocked the car expertly back and forth, gaining enough momentum to move forward a few feet. We two shoveled in front of him, like sweepers at a curling rink. Then one last push and the car made the cleared lane.

And then kept on going…

It disappeared.

I looked at my friend in alarm. He laughed, waved me forward.

“Go,” he said.

I stumbled through the snow up the road. Whenever there was a break in the line of cars going forward, I jumped into the inside lane and broke into a run.

The wind was still howling, the snow still blinding. Yet running up the New York Thruway in a blizzard at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night seemed a perfectly normal thing to do.

In less than a quarter of a mile, I saw the BMW and the Passat. He had found a clear part of the shoulder and pulled over.

It was my turn to tap at a door. The window of his car slid down to reveal a broad smile.

“Bye,” he said.

Then his car rolled forward and disappeared.

I got back in my car. First gear. I was moving. Second. Then third.

It was over.

All right, Ms. Lavigne, I can listen to your problems now.

A Little Dignity, Perhaps?

Let's see how the estimable people who run prisons respond to this. In my experience as a kid growing up in a penitentiary town, many of those outside the bars should be inside them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Highway Clobbery

From the Edinburgh Evening News, 1978:

“While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear. ‘He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,’ said Mr Thirsty. ‘Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but unhappily for us all, he died.’”

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

[With apologies to Stephen Leacock.]

The current issue of The East Side Monthly, a freebie magazine about what’s happening in the wealthiest neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, features a profile of one Reverend Jonathan Huyck. Following five years as a pastor at the American Cathedral in Paris, the Episcopal globetrotter has returned to the center of the universe, where he spent his undergrad days at Brown University. An excerpt:

“Father Huyck is no longer a student, however. He and his family are settling in as true residents. They have explored the Farmer’s Market at Lippitt Park, joined the Athenæum and RISD’s Museum of Art, and participated in Fox Point’s National Neighborhood Day event. Jonathan rides his bike to work. He hopes to get on the East Bay and Blackstone River Bike Paths soon. ‘Oh, and there is Taste of India on Wickenden Street – my all-time favorite restaurant,’ says Jonathan. ‘It is better than anything in Paris.’”

James Frey, Revisited

Here’s a suggestion. Anybody who bought Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope should wrap them up and put them in the mail.

Here’s where you send the package:

The White House; 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue; Washington, DC 20500.

Include a note asking for your money back. The author can afford it. Say the books were advertised as non-fiction, when they clearly are not.

Failing that, you might try the publisher. Hardcover for both books is Crown. Paperback is Three Rivers. Mass market paper for Audacity is Vintage. All are imprints of Random House.

Random House; 1745 Broadway; New York NY 10019.

You may also want to go into your local boxstore and ask that they reshelve the books properly, in the fiction section. If the clerks balk, tell them it’s easy: Make a space between Joyce Carol Oates and Sean O’Casey and put the books there.

Where they belong.

Grasping Odious Plutocracy

That’s right, the GOP. If you’re reading anything that does not refer to them in a similar manner, you’re wasting your time.

I think the major cultural shift in my lifetime has been the change from an ethos where the poor are pitied to one where the poor are hated.

The next chapter should be interesting: where the poor are feared. It is only a matter of time for exasperation at the corrupt banditry of the present day to express itself in acts of serious violence, coordinated or not.

It has happened before, and it will happen again.

Remember how Fukuyama and friends claimed that history had supposedly “ended” twenty years ago? Well, it didn’t, did it?

Sleep tight, GOP. While you can.

Wikibook

Been listening for days now how Julian Assange is some sort of demented megalomaniac. The oh-so-dim conversations on the radio are all about how gratuitous this latest document dump is, how secrecy is necessary for diplomacy, how his behavior can be construed as some new definition of treason.

Interestingly, many of those fulminating, at least here in the United States, are journalists. If ever we have been treated to the spectacle of the U.S. press as the de facto fourth branch of government, it is on this occasion.

Let us pretend that we have a sentient press corps in this country. What precisely is newsworthy in all this Wikileaks business? Because there is something hugely novel to have come out of Assange’s actions.

Nobody likes Iran? Nope.

Canada has an inferiority complex? No.

Americans subvert Spanish justice? No.

Prince William is a corrupt upper-class twit? No.

I suppose a hint is in order. Think: Spartacus, Luther, Robespierre, Marx.

Correct. Assange is a revolutionary. In contradistinction to Seymour Hersh and Daniel Ellsberg, Assange is not about abuse in a system – no, he is engaged in an all-out assault on the system itself.

It does not really matter what the documents say. Assange is simply trying to cripple the ways those in power communicate with each other. Knowledge, now more than ever, is power. If everyone on the inside thinks his or her opinions, intentions, plots, bribes, coups, murders, lies, frauds, deals, arrangements, networks, etc. will one day be exposed to those on the outside, then the interconnectedness of elites will have to be pared down, modified to such an extent that their effectiveness in carrying out secret agendas will be damaged. And even if they come up with lean, secure systems, they too will one day be hacked into and exposed. The genie is out of the bottle.

Assange has been saying this for years. Plainly. He is dedicated to bringing down the proprietary secrecy of those in power, believing it inimical to the functioning of true democratic institutions. Just think, for example, of how Obama broke his promise and conducted negotiations with the health-care industry behind closed doors. It’s our money, the president is our employee. But secrecy prevailed.

Examples are legion, in which something that should be transparent and open is not. We already know something about the lies regarding the wars, the mass killings, the tortures, the financial fiasco, the mortgage meltdown… Assange has started with the U.S. but expect more to follow: he’s already said he’s going after a bank and suggested as well that he has some stuff on the Russians. I wouldn’t be suprised if UN peacekeeping then comes up, followed by NGOs, charity operations, polluters – perhaps even something about the press.

To many, then, Assange must necessarily be the enemy. He wants to shatter their comfy arrangements, their public narrative about how everything is working so well and how you shouldn't worry your pretty little heads about this, that or the other aberration. So those calling for his scalp, or using Interpol as a smear machine, do have some justification. He is their nightmare. Just yesterday we saw the ever-reliable Joe Lieberman do a fairly good imitation of a propaganda minister, boasting about how he got Amazon to shut down Wikileaks’ servers. This is but a foretaste. To truly crush what Wikileaks and its inevitable successors plan on doing would require a level of repression unseen in the West since the middle of the last century. It will be interesting to see how far people will be willing to go to shut it down – or, for that matter, to keep it up.

Spartacus revolted against the injustice of slavery; Luther, against the cash cow that had become the Catholic Church; Robespierre, against the denial of power to the bourgeoisie by the ancien régime; Marx, against the inhumanity of unfettered capitalism and industrialism.

Whether you agree with Assange about this moment in history depends, of course, on whether you think our institutions are quarter- half- or entirely corrupt. Your call. But what you can’t turn away from is the fact that a new form of revolution is afoot, one that, if it meets with the success its author hopes, makes that other contemporary specter, radical Islam, look like yesterday’s game. The internet revolution has, at last, spawned an internet revolution.

Assange is facebooking the way the powerful operate.

This is new. This is news.

Ever wonder why hockey is so violent?

For those still laboring under the impression that Canada is somehow more civilized than elsewhere – particularly its southern neighbor:

http://thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com/2010/11/bubbles-buddies-strike-again.html

The most amazing thing about this video, aside from the victim having her brassiere cut off and her clothing removed, is the behavior of the female police officer. She completely fakes out her male colleagues by pretending to be hit. She then waddles about in counterfeit pain, egging them on.

For those still laboring under the impression that women are somehow more civilized than others – particularly men.

For more police funnies from the north, go to cathiefromcanada.blogspot.com and look at the antics during the G20 summit in Toronto.

This. American. Life.

Mother. Father. Toy. Sibling. Insult. Hormone. Embarrassment. Professor. Exam. Dating. Job. Dating. Backpack. Rent. Marriage. Job. Diaper Disposal. Mortgage. Car Pool. Job. Gym. Adultery. Tuition. Divorce. Rehab. Dating. Illness. Grandchildren. Origami. What?

Theodicy With Bubbles

The Cathars taught us that nature is the creation of an evil god. Francis of Assisi preached to the birds, claiming that the goodness of god manifested itself in nature. Science has now settled that nature is neither good nor evil, but, generally, it’s not that pretty. Kind of nasty, actually.

Augustine said, more or less, that humans have free will, but generally only to exercise it in the service of evil. Thanks a lot, Augustine. Some of the more radical gnostic sects said that once you were an initiate, once you possessed the gnosis, you could do whatever the hell you pleased. You had transcended morality and that in doing evil you were, in fact, doing good. Or neither.

My friend George sells tropical fish. This year, at the annual fish convention in Ohio, Thor, his favorite cichlid, won Best in Show, First Prize in his category, and People’s Choice. Thor has won these awards two years in a row. How does a fish win People’s Choice? “Look him in the eye, Steve, he’s got such fucking attitude!”

But I digress.

George has another fish, whose name I didn’t catch. But we were introduced. He’s big, from Madagascar, and his natural habitat has almost disappeard. He won First Prize in his category, too. George has found a girfriend for him. He takes her from her tank, puts her in a water-filled plastic bag and shows her to the big fellah. “He’s definitely interested, but he can’t have her till next year,” George says. “No girls for you, buddy! You’re gonna win another show. You can’t lose your focus!”

George is clearly god here. Is he evil? Or good?

And what about Ms. Madagascar? Does no one ever ask her opinion?

I confess to being spiritually confused here.

All Quiet

About fifteen years ago, I published a book on the First World War entitled Back to the Front. As today is the momentous anniversary of its conclusion in 1918, let’s recall what went on in during its last days. At the time, after four years of hell, everyone referred to the conflict as The War To End All Wars.

Right.

Anyway, here is what I wrote:

“The Allied attacks then came in quick succession, forcing the German warlords to scramble to send their ever-depleting number of reinforcements to help manage an orderly retreat. On August 20, the French attacked again on the Aisne; the following day the British hit north of Albert. By the time the Americans went into action at St. Mihiel the Germans had retreated in Picardy once again to the Hindenburg Line. Even that could not be held. The Belgians and the British finally broke through at Ypres, as the Americans pressed up in the Argonne in late September. Soon every Allied army was attacking as the German army slowly backed its way through Belgium and northern France.

“At home, imperial Germany began to fall apart. The autocratic government and the privations of wartime could be endured no longer. Riots broke out, sailors mutinied, and a new liberal chancellor was appointed to work real reforms with the Reichstag. Ludendorff resigned his post on October 27 – and would remain in obscurity until 1923, when he participated in Hitler’s failed beer-hall putsch in Munich. In early November, 1918, the Second Reich finally collapsed under the pressure of mounting chaos, and the Kaiser, forced to abdicate, fled to the Netherlands. The newly constituted republic consented to the Allied terms for surrender and the armistice was signed in Field-Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in a clearing of the Compiègne forest. The papers were initialed in the early hours of November 11, 1918. A few seconds before eleven o’clock that same morning, one observer with the South African troops in Flanders saw a German machine-gunner fire off a scorching hail of bullets toward their trenches. At the stroke of eleven, the gunner stood up, made a deep bow, turned around, and walked away.

“The war was over. Princip’s bullet had caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go to fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million had died in their ditches.”

Shame. Period.

Today’s op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Rush to Cut Nukes?”, shows how debased journalism and public discussion of world affairs have become. The authors claim that the New Start treaty with Moscow will undermine natural security. Shaving off a few nuclear warheads from the American stockpile will somehow lessen this country’s ability to destroy the entire planet multiple times over. The recent election, they claim in a delusional crescendo, hinged on this issue.

But what stands out are the op-ed’s authors. One is John Bolton, the discredited American unilateralist. Suckled for years by far-right think tanks, Bolton is considered as a strangelovian clown abroad, the type of screaming, bellicose, inhumane hawk that all empires belch out from time to time. Naturally, he was Bush’s guy at the UN for a couple of years. If your family dies in a war soon, look no further than Bolton for the reason.

It gets better. The other author is John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney-general. Yoo is famous for penning the “torture memo,” effectively tearing up US principles and international engagements for the sake of unfettered, brutal presidential power. Now this paragon of human decency, this technocrat of torture, this profoundly impaired apparatchik, is somehow an expert on arms control. Nuclear weaponry! Were it not so terrifying, it would be laughable. Torquemada meets Clausewitz, minus the intellect.

UC Berkeley, to its everlasting shame, has kept this immoral homunculus on its faculty, and now the Times publishes him.

There may very well be something to discuss on the the New Start treaty. But I would trust my local school crossing guard’s opinion on the subject before I would listen to either of these two guys. There is absolutely no reason to publish thoroughly illegitimate voices on matters of importance. There are places for these voices – it’s called Fox News.

Perhaps the Times is hoping to bump up circulation. What’s next? An etiquette column for Rush Limbaugh, a legislator’s diary by Jim DeMint, an ethics rubric for Tom DeLay?

John Yoo and John Bolton on nuclear armaments – somewhere in a forest, there are trees weeping over this waste of newsprint.

The editors of the New York Times, apparently, do not take their paper seriously. Do they really expect us to keep reading it?

His Place in History

Now that the Aristotle of Crawford, Texas, is once again in the spotlight, arguing with his usual moral clarity on decisions made during his tenure as Philosopher-King, let us remind ourselves just how he escorted us back to the fourteenth century. From the opus minor currently crimping my blogging style:

"This torture section, given Bernard’s persuasive proclivities, must have been riveting. Doubtless, his enumeration of medieval inquisitorial techniques was colorful and exhaustive. The “queen of torments” was the strappado, in which the victims’ hands would be tied behind his back, and then, the loose end of the rope coil having been played across a ceiling beam, he would be raised into the air, his outstretched, distended arms bearing his full weight. Heavy objects might be tied to his feet, to make the contortion even more unbearable. This torment might initially last only a few minutes – the time, it was suggested canonically, for the holy inquisitor to intone a prayer – before being renewed if the results proved unsatisfactory. Further inducements to contrition included the leg-screw, whereby the calves of the person being questioned would be placed in a vise-like contraption, the two concave metal plates on either side of the leg slowly tightened to induce excruciating pain.

"The inquisitor had other refinements, which Bernard would have taken care to relate in detail. For women and children, binding of the wrists tightly by coarse wet cord, then unbinding them and starting up the process once again, with even more force, was considered humane. Other extremities could be useful as well. Savagely beating the soles of the feet was fairly common. This sent pain rioting up through the body. For obdurate people, an inflammable liquid could be splashed on the feet and then set alight. This attention to the body’s extremities arose from the duty of the pious Christian, then as now, to avoid causing major organ failure. Another common technique entailed sleep deprivation. Forty hours of enforced sleeplessness came to be considered the happy mean. Further treatments common in Carcassonne included the rack, and other means of stretching and dislocating (which sometimes came accompanied by the judicious application of hot brands), and the shock of freezing cold water. Simulated drowning, known today as waterboarding, would not have been beyond the ken of the Dominican technicians seeking the truth."

Wilde Weighs In

On the wisdom of putting back into power the people who got you into the mess in the first place:

“The most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being the queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”

Replace starved peasant with grinning unemployed white guy with his remote set to Fox, and you’ll see Oscar’s point.

The Pentateuch for Muggles

Since everyone in the US is thinking about either the election today or the result of the North American men’s hardball championship last night (during which the celebrities in the Texas Rangers’ War Criminal Loge looked so disappointed), it might be an opportune time to change the topic to another burning issue of the moment. How about reconciling religion and sorcery? Readers in Delaware, take note.

Courtesy of the O’Shea Bible Braintrust™, which consists of a has-been, a teen and a tween, a useful guide to the fab five:

Ginny’s sis by marriage is Hermione Granger.

“Voldermort’s evil hex awed us,” said Dumbledore and Snape.

Leave it to cousin Dudley to ruin Harry’s childhood!

“The books sold in such great numbers,” giggled Joanne all the way to the bank, “that I’m thinking of auctioning off my laundry lists!”

“Due to Ron and me,” Harry boasted, “Hogwarts has been saved.”

You are now free to retch in this mess of pottage.

The Fright Stuff

On moving here about a decade ago, I immediately noticed that Providence, Rhode Island, is best suited not for Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July or St. Patrick’s Day, but for Halloween. The city looks the part. Creepy neighborhoods of eighteenth-century houses give way to large murky swaths of nineteenth-century mansion mania. Ill-lit streets, dead leaves swirling through the air, memories of native son H.P. Lovecraft and frequent visitor, Edgar Allan Poe, a large population of former art students with a love of the elaborately macabre and just a general crow-in-the-graveyard feel to its black autumn nights… the place is ideal for good, dark fun.

Take last night. After the kiddie stuff – though even that was punctuated with cemeteries on lawns and “statues” coming to life and screaming through their gore at the terrified trick-or-treaters – I decided to take a stroll with my younger daughter down a commercial street near our place (The elder, Pippi Longstocking, was at a friend’s watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

We passed someone with an axe buried in her head.

At a tea-shop we saw a sign: “Alice in Wonderland.” Fortunately, we had not changed out of our costumes. My daughter was still an orange and I remained Amelia Earhardt. As she loves Alice, we decided to go in.

At the counter, on barstools, no fewer than five shapely rumps clad in clinging vintage. A head turned… full scarlet lips. The women of Mad Men.

“What’s this got to do with Alice?” the orange asked.

“Look,” I said quickly, “There are playing cards on the wall.”

A Playboy bunny appeared before us.

“I’m the rabbit,” she said.

The orange looked at her dubiously.

“Want a cupcake?”

As the bunny jiggled off, a black guy came in wearing a suit of armor. His sword looked bloodstained.

“Here you are.” The bunny handed us two cupcakes, dark, dark haemoglobin-red.

“Maybe we should go?”

The orange nodded.

We walked back home, eating the cupcakes. From the doorway of a sushi restaurant, we heard a woman’s voice.

“Mmmm, those look soooo good!”

It was Morticia Addams.

All the Scuttlebutt That's Fit to Print

Today’s New York Times website. Biggest story, heavily reported by a ‘team’ of star journalists, in the coveted top left spot: “Wikileaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil.”

Just about says it all about corporate American journalism, doesn’t it? What a deliberately distracting waste of resources, talent and time. I invite you to visit the Guardian’s website to actually get a sense of what today’s Wikileaks document dump tells us about the war in Iraq. That is today's lead story. The interactive report is superb.

Make it stop

Yesterday I visited a book boxstore out in the burbs. We all know the type: a Starbucks counter, rows and rows of Justin Bieber cds and dvds, lots of candles and calendars, and, in the corner grudgingly given over to books, the department devoted to Medieval Inquisition one one-millionth the size of the section labelled Teen Paranormal Romance.

Actually, I just made up one of the book departments – there was no section devoted to Medieval Inquisition. But you knew that already.

The store is designed so that its large front windows look out onto a parking lot the size of Lake Erie. Relieving the vista somewhat are five wide columns, separating the floor-to-ceiling windows. Inside the store, these columns are adorned with large and very splendid replications of book covers of five American classics, one to a column.

So we have: Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Thoreau’s Walden, Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and…

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Excuse me? Is it just me, or does anyone sane think that Rand’s vomitus of ill-digested pop Nietzschean schlock qualifies as an American classic? Yes, there are Randians among us and a few have done useful things (like invent Wikipedia), but the majority are boys who never got over having their first woodie. I’m looking at you, Alan Greenspan, and your Tea Party pals. I read Atlas Shrugged as a teen, and while it made me mean and nasty for a couple of weeks as I struggled to unleash my inner Fonzie, eventually I reverted to the non-sociopathic norm.

So why does the corporation that runs the bookstore rank Rand along with Thoreau? Is it to establish a he-said, she-said equivalence, somewhat like pairing Abraham Lincoln with Sarah Palin? Is Rand there to up the female quotient? So Rand is the superior to Dickinson, Ferber, Wharton, Highsmith, Morrison? Is it a sop to screw-you capitalism, a hint that Mockingbird’s takedown of Jim Crow in no way reflects the corporation’s view that the big bad govimint should never step on people’s prejudices, a view most recently on display in the campaign of Ayn’s lunatic namesake, Rand Paul? Or is it a reflection of sales volume? If so, where’s Danielle Steele?

Maybe it’s all about rugged individualism. John Galt = Henry David Thoreau = Atticus Finch = Jay Gatsby = George Milton and Lennie Small… No, that’s not right.

Maybe, just maybe, the people in the corporation who made the selection actually believe that Ayn Rand was a great thinker and a wonderful writer.

If that's the case, they should stick to Teen Paranormal Romance.

The Long Stern Tables

The United States has the largest prison population in the world. Over 2 million people. More than 35 countries of Europe combined.

People get busted for dope, one in three black males is entangled in the prison-parole machinery.

And then there’s this. From Tampa Bay Online. I think that since we love incarceration so much, maybe we should add a few more. But it ain’t going to happen, not to upstanding citizens:

TAMPA — Some employees of Florida's largest "foreclosure mill" were given jewelry, cars and houses from the firm, in exchange for altering and forging key documents used to obtain foreclosures, according to a statement released today by the Florida Attorney General's Office.

The office released transcripts of two interviews it conducted for its investigation into the law offices of David J. Stern. The sworn statements were from Kelly Scott, a former employee of Stern's and Mary R. Cordova, a former employee of G&Z, a process server used by Stern's office. The women's testimonies appear to back up that of former Stern's employee Tammie Lou Kapusta, whose statement was released last week. The three statements paint a picture of a secret system designed to speed up the foreclosure process. Attorneys and staff members forged signatures, changed dates, passed around notary stamps, the women say in interviews with attorney general's staff.

The two former Sterns employees described long tables where employees would sign as a witness and notarize documents without actually witnessing the signing. Twice a day, Scott said, the company's chief operating officer, Cheryl Samons, would go into the office and sign 500 documents at a time without reading them.

Scott was Samons' legal assistant.

As a perk of Samons' job, Stern's office would routinely pay her personal mortgage, a car payment, her electric bills and her cell phone bill, according to Scott, who told investigators Stern also bought Samons a new BMW sport utility vehicle every year and gave her and other employees jewelry. Additionally, Stern purchased employee David Vargas a house, a car and a cell phone, Scott claims in her statement.

Scott said the office would move forward with cases, even if they knew the homeowner had not been properly notified of the lawsuit.

Bye-bye, Miss American TP

The rehabilitation has begun. How sadly predictable.

In the Washington Post last Thursday, an article described how Emily Ekins, a grad student, took photographs of 250 signs at the big Tea Party rally in D.C. and found that only 5% of them were racist. Yet 25% of the media coverage dealt with racism in the Tea Party. Today, in the New York Times, the reliably deranged altar-boy Ross Douthat takes up that study and cries “A-ha! Take that, you liberals!”

Here’s what the grad student, as opposed to the tree-wasting NYT columnist, says:

"Really this is an issue of salience," Ekins said. "Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn't mean the other people don't share those views, but it doesn't mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they're going to put it on a sign, when it's actually only a couple of people."

Actually, Emily, 5% is quite a lot of people. In fact, I think the ratio is just about right. If 5% of your movement is made up of openly racist primates, then I think multiplying by 5 to cover the faint-hearted, the illiterate and the canny is quite reasonable. Icebergs have tips, y’know.

Aside from the TP’s screamingly obvious contingent of cranky-crackers-being-manipulated-by-big-business, there is the other screamingly obvious element driving the party. Some people in this country are happy to be stuck in Fantasyland 1950. The USA was then Number One, because every other nation on earth was on its knees. America made the rules, printed the money, and did what it wanted. It was a situation that couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

If you take the exceptional for the norm, of course you’re going to be disappointed. Simple as that.

So spare me the blame-the-liberals crap, Douthat.

Paris, Arizona

The lower house of the French parliament voted through a charming new law yesterday. Henceforth, anyone who has been a French citizen for less than ten years and who has killed a policeman or a fireman will be stripped of French citizenship. Presumably, those who were born French can do anything they please without fear of losing their nationality, since they are white.

Further, the new law makes it easier to deport people – we’re talking Roms here – on the grounds of aggressive panhandling and squatting of public or private land. Doesn’t matter if they’re from EU countries or not.

Sarkozy’s minister of immigration, Eric Besson, says the law is “strongly symbolic.”

I’ll say.

The country is wracked by strikes and in need of reform. Unemployment has skyrocketed. Fiscal policy favors the rich. The plight of the slums is neglected. The problem of racism remains unaddressed: fully 40% of Arab and black French people who obtain doctoral or post-doc degrees emigrate to Canada, Australia and other countries.

So what does Sarko’s government do? It drums up a loud, unnecessary, inhumane law to strip French delinquents of their citizenship. Pure window-dressing. Even some members of Sarko’s party couldn’t vote for it.

The French government is a disgrace. It will do anything to distract attention, even something profoundly undemocratic and at odds with France’s admirable traditions.

Voltaire and Diderot are spinning in their graves.

Local Color

Yesterday was one of those days that God gives us to make all the other crap in life bearable. Crisp autumn air, a blameless blue sky with a mischievous cloud or two to relieve the monotony of beauty, and nature itself turning biblical and putting on its coat of many colors.

I leave Ottawa early for the 400-mile drive back down to Providence. Behind me, to the north, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, rise the Gatineau Hills. They are aflame, their sumac forests a startling scarlet beneath the vault of the blue.

After a half-hour on the Ottawa-Montreal expressway, I turn right, south, onto a secondary road that leads straight to the St. Lawrence River and the border. It runs through the rich dairy farms of the Ottawa Valley, crests a scruffy ridge of yellow foliage, then descends into the St. Lawrence Lowlands. Red silos and silver church steeples pointing at the sky, the stubble of harvested cornfields, spinneys of poplars the color of clementines – I stop at a honor-system roadside farmstand, slip a couple of loonies into the box and grab a small plastic bag. It contains white cheddar cheese curds, the chewy snack food of the region and, in nearby Quebec, one of the three ingredients, along with french fries and brown gravy, of poutine, French Canada’s stupendously weird contribution to sloppy cuisine.

The border at Cornwall, Ontario, is peculiar, too. Two bridges span the St. Lawrence here, one from the town of Cornwall on the Canadian mainland to Cornwall Island; the other from that island to the American side. Canada used to have its multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art border station on the island, but when it decided recently to arm its border guards, the proprietors of Cornwall Island protested. And they are not just any landlords – they are Mohawks, jealous of their independence (there’s more Mohawk land on the New York side). They tolerated the border post, but they would not stand for government men carrying guns on their land. Neither side blinked. The result? The Canada border station was moved: It is now on the mainland and is little more than a couple of makeshift shacks with their rear ends sticking into a riverside traffic circle at the foot of the bridge, an embarrassment unsuccessfully embellished by a flowing clothesline of red maple leaf flags.

As if in retaliation, the first of the two grand bridges – the Canadian one – has been left in ridiculous disrepair by the authorities. It doesn’t seem to have been resurfaced since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in the 1950s. The cars crawl up and over it, juddering and jolting – and, no doubt, spilling the steaming contents of countless Tim Horton’s coffee cups every day.

As I wipe the hot coffee from my jeans, the traffic picks up and we pass the deserted, grandiose Canadian border station on the island. Then up and up the American span, an aquamarine suspension bridge, rising gracefully over the dark waters of the southern arm of the St. Lawrence. There is construction at the midway point of the bridge; a traffic light controls our impatience. The wait is long, but we are high, so very high above the earth and water. My fellow drivers start to look around. To the north, forty or fifty miles’ distant, the red slash of the Gatineau. To the south, at about the same distance, the looming orange outline of the Adirondacks. Beneath us, far below, two mammoth container ships, one red, the other grey, plow smartly eastward, pursued by playful seagulls, white against the deep blue water. The ships are the heralds of many others to come, in the annual race to get out of the Seaway – past the locks near Montreal then beyond Quebec City to the open sea – before winter closes in and shuts the waterway down.

And then, at eye level about two hundred yards to our left, comes a great, noisy chevron of Canada geese, racing south, to escape the winter, too. Power windows slide down to hear their honking.

The wait at the American border crossing stretches on. The Americans’ spanking new techno-up-the-wazoo facility, cleverly not built on Mohawk land, has seven lanes open, all of them crammed with cars, SUVs, pick-up trucks and motorcycles. It is the start of the Canadian Thanksgiving/Columbus Day weekend.

The minutes, then the quarter-hours, pass… we are barely moving. Three lanes away, a woman gets out of her purple sportscar. Her companion does the same. They are in their thirties, Hollywood blondes in tight jeans, clinging sweaters and pricey sunglasses. The first yells, to the border-guard booth some twenty car-lengths away, something to the effect, “Why is this taking so damn long?!” Her Paris Hilton friend, from outside the convertible, reaches over and leans on the horn with one hand and then gestures with her free arm for all the rest of us to follow suit. There are no takers. The music from the car radios continues to mix in a low, incomprehensible symphony. The women shake their straw manes, laughing, and get back in their car.

Once past the border, I turn left, eastward, and am immediately in the Akwesasne Reserve. I make my usual stop at the Bear’s Den, a trading post that just happens to have cheap gasoline and tax-free ciggies. The lot is filled with Mohawk teenagers, jumping up and down, waving signs, offering to wash cars to benefit their high school. Some are in full Iroquois regalia. Three braves set to work on my car, and when I leave the Bear’s Den, my green Passat gleams in the yellowing light of mid-day.

The moment is so lovely that I decide to take the most scenic of all the scenic routes leading home. At an Indian mega-lodge complex surrounded by a sea of parked cars – Akwesasne’s casino – I turn left and head south, through the narrow strip of the fertile Lowlands on the New York side. The reservation is left behind, giving way to tiny towns, a few ramshackle farms and lonely stands of trees tawny and gold in the sunlight. At a crossroads in a small town, there are two horsedrawn buggies parked on the shoulder, a trestle table set up between them. Bearded Amish men are selling their produce.

Their customers are south Asians, two women in brilliant, multicolored saris. Their laughing husbands click their digital cameras as the young women pose with the bemused Amish elders. I glance at the plates of their expensive sedans: Ontario. My guess, given the affluence, irony and ease: Toronto. But how could these big-city types have found their way here, my secret way south, far off the beaten track? Then I remember the name of the small town: Bombay. Clearly, these Torontonians possess a GPS and a sense of humor.

The land grows poorer as the mountains approach. Boulders crop up in the green grassy fields, which in turn cede to a tough barenness resembling the moors of England. Then comes my favorite stretch of this familiar detour – the road describes an elongated S-shaped curve down into a gentle valley, past a well-kept red farmhouse at the bottom and then up to a rocky pasture where a herd of bison grazes, magnificent and iconic. Today I slow to take in the sight – just as two minivans with Connecticut plates come to a halt on the opposite shoulder and slide open their side doors. I brake and let two Muslim families, the women in headscarves shepherding a brace of children, cross the road to snap pictures. They wave enthusiastically to thank me.

The farmland gives out. Small towns, St. Regis Falls being the most beautiful, huddle in the forests of the foothills, built around rushing streams. Then, through a long, uninhabited straightaway, perhaps twenty miles in length, up and up, bordered on both sides by impenetrable pines. I slip an incongruous Scottish novel into the tapedeck.

A few unkempt clusters of houses now appear in the trees every once in a while, their front yards covered in used car tires and rusting trailers. Human geography does not always match its surroundings.

Then a few miles north of Saranac Lake comes another cherished stretch of the journey. I break out of the forest and enter a long and broad alpine meadow, a Sound of Music expanse perhaps a couple of square miles in size. On all sides, in the middle distance, standing in rumpled grandeur, rise several different ranges of the Adirondacks, now all a brilliant bouquet of every color in the autumnal palette. In the center of the meadow, a tiny graveyard, old, unfenced and well-tended.

I hit the eject button on the tapedeck then slow to look around me. To my left I hear a roar. Passing me leisurely are a middle-aged couple on a Harley, all black leather and fringes and badges. The husband, a Jack Sprat of a fellow wearing a Old Glory bandanna and an expression of pure delight, turns and says something to his voluminous partner. She laughs, hugs him closer… they’re livin’ the dream.

He guns it, and as the mountains and the sky watch, the woman on the back gives me a thumbs-up and a smile.

A sorry crew

So retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has said that he is sorry for casting his vote in 1976 to restore the death penalty.

Sweet.

In 1991, a dying Lee Atwater apologized for his disgraceful playing of the race card against Michael Dukakis by dreaming up the Willie Horton attack ad.

In 1995, Robert McNamara apologized for causing the death of millions by his dishonest prosecution of the Vietnam War.

In his latter years, Robert Byrd apologized repeatedly for his nakedly racist filibustering of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In an interview given to GQ in 2007, Colin Powell apologized for his shameless lying at the United Nations in 2003 as he attempted to justify the mass murder about to be unleashed in Iraq.

Congratulations, Justice Stevens, you have just joined a select group:

Men whose apologies should never, ever be accepted.

Don't kid yourself... They knew what they were doing.

Brazil, Rhode Island

An ordinary Sunday afternoon, out with my devil spawn at the local Whole Foods shopping for stuff to stuff in school lunchboxes. The regular complaints: “Oreos that are organic!! Why can’t we get real Oreos?” “How come they don’t sell Heinz ketchup?” “Noooo, those veggie chips are so gross!”

There was a line at the checkout.

“Why don’t they have Entertainment Weekly?”

Directly in front of us stood a teenage girl, her organic double-fudge, peanut-butter, mud-chocolate granola bar the sole item on the counter. She was looking at the cashier, her straight black hair falling down, hiding her face from us.

The cashier picked up the item, zinged the barcode. She was about to hand back the granola bar, then thought the better of it.

“You’re very beautiful,” she said to the girl.

“Thank you!”

“No, really, you are beautiful.”

This was becoming interesting.

“So who were they?”

“Chinese and Norwegian,” the girl replied, without missing a beat.

What the hell were they talking about?

“Anywhere else?”

“Nope.”

The penny dropped.

“Can… can I see?” I said to the side of the teen’s head. She turned and smiled.

“Wasn’t I right?” the cashier said to me triumphantly. And, yes, she was – the girl was striking, unusual, of a beauty I’d never seen before.

The girl turned back to the cashier, who, it should now be said, was in her mid-twenties – and was no slouch in the beauty department.

“What’s yours?” the girl asked.

“Filipino and Irish,” the cashier replied carelessly.

“Got it.”

The two nodded, and then the girl left.

An organic moment.