Saturday, October 23, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

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.

Monday, October 18, 2010

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.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

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.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

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.

Monday, October 4, 2010

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.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

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.