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.