Photos I Like

A view of SF from the Grizzly Peak area above Cal, a closeup of a painting at the East Wing of the National Gallery in DC (can't remember the artist, but I really like the painting), and a water tower viewed from the High Line in Manhattan.

Wacko Conservatives -- How They Misunderstand the Founders and the Constitution

Columbia historian Alan Brinkley reviewing "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History" by Jill Lepore:

The architects of the Constitution, [Lepore] makes clear, did not agree about what it meant. Nor did they believe that the Constitution would or should be the final word on the character of the nation and the government. It was the product of much compromise, and few were satisfied with all its parts.

There were enormous omissions — among them the failure to define citizenship, the lack of a clear definition of suffrage, the evasion of most of the issues connected to African-Americans and Native Americans. Jefferson insisted that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Madison asked in Federalist 14, “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” The reality of the creation of the Constitution is a far cry from the idea that it instituted immutable limits to what government could do....

We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world — the principal causes of the crisis — have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries — taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution — are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation.

I'm White . . . I'd Forgotten

I don't know about you, but for a long time, I'd forgotten that I'm white. Last December, I realized that I had forgotten that I'm a white person. Yes, I have acknowledged that I'm a white guy in the past, and I'd attended various conferences on race relations, diversity, etc., but a fuller recognition of my whiteness had slipped away some. What a luxury it is to just be Greg! What a luxury to let my whiteness come and go and never stay too long! At last year's People of Color Conference (POCC, under the auspices of the National Association of Independent Schools), I didn't rediscover my whiteness because of all the people of color around me. No, I became white again when the students of color from my school became more attuned to being students of color. And they were fired up and clearly in need of talking about it with whomever cared about them. My initial reaction was to defer to our Multicultural Dean, to let him have those conversations because he'd want those conversations, and then it suddenly struck me that all of us should be able to have these conversations with these kids. That the kids should be feel not just comfortable having those conversations with all of us, but also confident that we had something to offer them that recognized them not just as wonderful kids, but as kids of color. So if I was going to have the conversations, I had to acknowledge for myself what is surely apparent to those kids in their fired up state of revelation: Greg is a white guy. If you're white like me, I think we need to make time to consider our whiteness, our consciousness of whiteness, our willingness to address our whiteness with others. I think we need to forego the luxury of not thinking about it . . . if, in fact, you're like me and you haven't had to think about it. Now, I know that my situation - white, male, straight, and at least raised Protestant -- confers a lot more of that luxury than it does for women, Jews, gays. But that whiteness advantage we all share is a substantial luxury. And it may be that people of color would be pleased to know that we address it now and then instead of letting it slip away out of consciousness.

You Know, You Should, Like, Speak with Conviction?

This video does more in a few minutes on this subject than I've done in years:

Ouch! Why My Generation is Lame

From the 9.12.10 column by Thomas Friedman in the NYT:

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

Wacko Conservatives and Why Obama Should Go After Them

From the 9.12.10 Frank Rich column in the NYT:

In June, the Business Roundtable chairman and Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech so rank with self-victimization — he claimed that government was “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” — that the normally polite Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein reviled him as “a corporate hack” peddling “much-discredited country-club nonsense.”

Seidenberg was soon topped by a multibillionaire Republican contributor, Stephen Schwarzman, who likened Obama’s modest financial regulatory package to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Among the clients of Schwarzman’s private equity company, Blackstone, is Goodyear, which signed on in 2004 to get advice on “optimal business configuration” and announced it was shipping more jobs to Asia the following year. That narrative, one of countless like it, might have come in handy last week when Obama was speaking in Ohio, just 30 miles from Goodyear’s headquarters.

. . . .

Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

Artists: Just Do It!

In The Name of the World, a novel by Denis Johnson, a character says this about art: "And I realized that what I most required of a work of art was that its agenda -- is that the word I want? -- not include me."

I've been pondering the nature of art. What makes something art? What makes you care about my opinion on this? You cannot hope to find some revelatory expertise here. You're hoping for an artful expression of unoriginal ideas.

Anyway, AG and I have tussled over whether the preparation of food can be an art form. She says certainly and I have been reluctant to agree. However, EC sees a measure of "pretentiousness" in certain dishes she's been served in the San Francisco area. It's as if she dismisses the artistic ambitions of chefs or friends adept in the kitchen. I push back here, too, and I'm left to wonder where I stand between AG and EC.

Who cares? Well, the greater question is, "What is art?" or "What makes some endeavor an artistic project?"

I like Denis Johnson's understanding: It's not a definition, not an attempt to answer the question, but it certainly does, for me, provide a guidepost for what I consider great art.

Food wouldn't qualify in this definition because chefs presumably want me to be delighted by their work. I am clearly part of their agenda. And, of course, this applies to most artists who must respond to the market to some extent if they want to do art.


In the movie "Big Night," the proprietor of a very busy, but schlocky Italian restaurant gives the proprietor of what we would now call an "artisinal," struggling Italian restaurant, the following advice: "Give them what they want and then you can give them what YOU want." Trouble is, once artists start compromising, they not only stop doing what they feel they must do, they also forget it. Or if they haven't forgotten it, they're so out of practice that they lost the ability.

So there's art and there's art. AG is right: The culinary arts are arts. EC is right: Chefs can risk pretentiousness.


However, we're a creative species. We try to turn everything into an art form. We add a flourish to the mundane and so, for example, walking eventually becomes dancing. Watch how kids innovate when playing a game. We want to be creative, beautiful, cool.

And we want to be acknowledged for our creative take on the quotidian. We want approval. At the same time, we tend to honor those artists who stay radically true to their vision without attending to the tastes of the day. Yes, we also think them jerks sometimes.

When I appreciate a work of art -- a novel, some music, something visual, and, yes, a meal, or skateboarding tricks, etc. -- my appreciation is serendipitous for the artist unless I'm part of a fairly predictable demographic targeted by the artist. I hope that the artist is creating whatever she needs to create and that I am happily responding to it. I don't want to think that she's pandering to my demographic or my tastes. I'd rather the artist do what she needs to do. And then, if I like it, great. If not, let's hope someone else will so that this artist can eat and work.

So art is best when the artist's agenda does not include me. And if the artist's agenda does speak to me . . . . good for the artist. I hope.

AG . . . Happy?

The College Essay: Who Are You and How Do You Know?

Look over to the right for the College Essay tag or link or whatever. Go there.

Cool Website to Play With

This is a bit like creating your own virtual, animated, Bobby McFerrin choir. Hard to describe and there's no reason to really. Just go to the site. Play.

Sex and Death -- Our Neuroses in the West

For at least 1000 years, we've not handled sex and death well in the West. Maybe not in the East either, quite possibly not in the Middle East, but definitely not in the Judeo/Christian, mostly Christian, West.

And why?

My guess: We've been neurotic about it ever since the vast majority of us bought into the notion that the Messiah, the Son of God, God incarnate, was born of a virgin, lived a virgin, and after dying, didn't stay dead.

So what does this story, especially as it is more and more glorified, imply? Well, one idea it seems to promote is that sex is too scandalous for a god, too carnal, even for incarnation. Tricky story here: On the one hand, we can't have a god born of an unmarried woman. Way too scandalous. On the other hand, we can't have a god born of a married woman who has had sex with her husband. If God is the father (and the Son as the Gospels would have it, thus giving us a family dynamic that at least casts a glance at Oedipus), then some mere mortal can't be involved . . . except in the giving birth part. But virgin birth? What's the point of that? Why is sex unworthy of a god's entry into the world? The Hindu Rama had a mama and a papa . . . on earth. Why not Jesus? I suspect it's because if Jesus comes from or goes to dust, the rest of us really are just dust to dust.

So a Child is Born in a manger and he, too, grows up to be a virgin before . . . .



Dying. But he doesn't stay dead. Or so we’re told. (As a child, I was instinctively skeptical about the Resurrection of Jesus. Sure, I wanted to believe it, but c’mon! My pastor didn’t cotton to skepticism. “If there’s one lie in the Bible,” he preached, “then it’s all lies!” This hard line struck me as troubling. It shut down the discussion instead of, perhaps, tending the sparse kindling of my flickering faith. And, of course, I didn’t really know about metaphor or allegory or even myth then.)

Death must be defeated. And if the Messiah can’t defeat death, what chance do the rest of us have? We call him the Messiah because he defeats death and shows us “the way.” Does the way require abstention, poverty, and crucifixion? Well, yes, it would seem so. After all, sex is suspect; we are plagued with wanting more than we have; and the anxiety about our mortality is the cross we all bear.
Now, there's much to inspire us in the resurrection part of the story, but only so long as we don't get the idea that consciousness cannot die and we can live forever in some sort of immaterial realm, i.e., as long as we don’t take the resurrection literally.

Why do we imagine that consciousness is eternal? Because we can’t imagine not being. It’s oxymoronic: to imagine not being. And so we create myths to help us wrestle with death. We let these myths work through the culture, through us as individuals; we revisit them and we try to derive some wisdom from them. It’s hard because we’re surrounded by what appears to be the finality of death. “Aye, but to die, and go we know not where . . . . ”

The 19th century French thinker Senancour struggled with faith and said, “if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us act as if it is an unjust fate." My response is, well, you do that. I can appreciate how unjust nothingness seems, and I can understand how hard it is reconcile to this. I sure don’t want to not be. So I can see how we’d create myths to helps us place all of this in perspective.

Perhaps the ancient Mesopotamian text “Gilgamesh” does this best. Our eponymous hero spends much of the time raging against the night after he sees his best friend, Enkidu, die. There is no bringing his friend back to life and Gilgamesh quickly surmises that the same awaits him, even him, the part divine, biggest, baddest, somfabitch in between the Tigris and Euphrates. So he looks for the elixir promising immortality. He finds it. Then loses it. Only then is he open to the wisdom of an elder who tells him that there the immortality of a memorable legacy is available to him, and that’s all, but it can be good, really good, if we can see the wisdom in it. Gilgamesh does, in fact, happily reconcile himself to this figurative immortality and then, guess what? Everything he found unsatisfying in life becomes glorious. And a life of wanting more, more, more only to be unsatisfied, unsatisfied, unsatisfied, becomes a life of fulfillment.

Great story!

But not good enough apparently for some of the seers to follow in the Fertile Crescent. I can hear them now, sitting around the fire, listening to the tale of Gilgamesh: “Yeah, yeah, I got your legacy, but don’t tell me that my mind will be snuffed out like a oil lamp.” What’s the point, after all, if we all just really die?

So we create myths and legends to help us deal with it. But let’s not create an industry around the idea that there is a literal life after death.

If it turns out that consciousness is eternal, then I wonder why there’s no firm evidence of that? We’re an ingenious species, a sentimental species. Wouldn’t someone in the after-life have figured out how to contact us in the here and now? You might say that God forbids this. But no one has rebelled against this edict? You might say that our temporal life will seem so . . . yesterday to us once we enter the Empyrean.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t buy it.

When we’re dead, we’re so dead. Death is like the bullet that destroys our brain before we hear the report of the gun that’s been pointed at us.

We rage against the night. As well we should. And we create a god to create a celestial, unlike the material realm around us, to support the afterlife. But if upon arriving in the afterlife, my consciousness is so expanded that I'm just la-dee-dah about Tina, then I'm not really me anymore. I might as well have died.

And since death is a door that has remained closed, we keep telling ourselves, via the afterlife industry, that there’s no brick wall behind it. And we have to keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves and keep telling ourselves, because if there IS anyone on the other side, they just don’t seem to care enough about us to make any contact with those of us on earth. Our insistence on an eternal consciousness is an afterlife addiction.


There’s a lovely, and gently honest, definition of faith in the Christian New Testament. In Hebrews 11:1, our unknown epistler explains, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It’s hard to know if the claim of “evidence” in the second clause is figurative or literal, but if it’s literal, it’s qualified playfully, I think, by the first clause which states that the substance of faith is hope. Just hope. Not evidence. And I admire Kierkegaard’s leap of faith whereby he embraces the second clause in its more literal sense. And what did he leap over? The Abyss of Doubt? Yes. And rational thought. And these two – the Abyss and rationality -- are inseparable because rational thought tells us that nothing awaits. Even that phrase, “nothing awaits,” seems to anthropomorphically suggest a consciousness that we will greet in some fashion, however briefly. No, let’s just stop hoping for what cannot be . . . nothingness does not await. It simply is.


My life is good. Sure, I don’t want the goodness of it to end. But nothingness means that I can’t possibly find myself in some realm where I’ll miss my earthly life.

I like the word “off” as a verb here. Disease, old age, or some calamity will off me. And I will not be in any form whatsoever ever again.

The Christian story of resurrection and the Gilgamesh legend of the partially divine being reconciling himself to immortality can inspire us to consider the figurative immortality we might achieve. But not if we take them literally. Then we just get neurotic as our beliefs fly in the face of what we see around us all the time, but are unwilling to accept and encouraged not to by the peer pressure of the after-lifers.

Wacko Conservatives -- Dr. Laura and the "Ground Zero" Mosque Opposition

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the conservative talk radio advice and insult dispenser, recently sprayed the airwaves with "n______" in response to an African-American caller who had been upset by some racial slurs, specifically n______, directed her way. Dr. Laura wondered if maybe the caller was too sensitive, too thin-skinned. After all, she argued, black people use n_________ all the time with one another. By the end of the call, Dr. Laura had used the term many, many times as she explained why white people might be confused about whether the term is permissible.

I'm not confused. Who's confused? White kids on occasion, sure. But adults? I'm confused about how anyone could be confused about it. What? African-Americans start using the word with one another (and for the record, I think it's a bad idea even for them) and suddenly it's open season for white people to use it? Who are the white people just waiting for tacit permission to say "n________" so that they can get down with their black bros? Who are the white people stupid enough to think that's going to be cool?

This needs to be explained to adults?

An NPR commentator provided a good analogy explaining why the permission to use "n_____" does not extend to anyone who isn't black. "I can say things about my sister," he explained, "but you can't say things about my sister."

So Dr. Laura apologized, but also told Larry King that she would quit the show so that she could speak freely. "I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what is on my mind, in my heart, what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry."

She's an idiot.

She never lost her First Amendment rights. The Bill of Rights protects us from the government, not from the displeasure of others. Does she really believe that the First Amendment protects her from other people taking issue with her? She has every legal right to say and think just about whatever she wants.

The First Amendment exists for the very purpose of allowing people to piss off other people and not get killed or jailed. We don't need a First Amendment to protect supporters of say, moms and puppies. We need it for ....

Muslims, I guess, in this country. But . . . conservatives have forgotten this.

Conservative commentators -- following in the footsteps of their ideological ancestors who persecuted Catholics and some wayward Protestants, not to mention Jews -- have conflated Islam with Nazism because a Muslim leader, an imam who has been chosen by President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and the FBI as a liaison with the Muslim community, wants to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks away from Ground Zero to better serve his growing flock. “Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” Newt explained.

He has also argued that you can't find churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia, so why should we allow mosques here! Great idea, Newt! Let's use Saudi Arabia as the standard for religious tolerance.


1.57 billion people, 23% of the world's population, are Muslim.

To conservative Newt Gingrich, they are all Nazis . . . or the moral equivalent. For you young 'uns out there, Newt is a presidential aspirant, and former Speaker of the House. No conservatives have stated that he's crossed a line here. None of them seem to get it that when we suggest that all Muslims are morally nefarious, craven, and maniacally genocidal (i.e., Nazis), we might create a few more enemies among them.

And, yes, unfortunately the spineless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid agrees and our mealy-mouthed qualifier in chief, President Obama, can't take firm stand. (For the best commentary on this, see here.)

So Dr. Laura believes that her First Amendment rights are violated if people disagree with her; Newt believes that the First doesn't apply to people with whom he disagrees; Democratic Party leaders side-step the issue at best; and as is often the case, the only people who seem to understand the First Amendment are the people who need it most.

Another Overused Word: Passion

The statement on the bottle of Lipton iced tea says that the tea leaf selectors are apparently "passionate" about choosing the right tea leaves for my tea. What does this passion get them? A spot in the fridge of a gas station mini-mart.

One of the funders for my local NPR affiliate claims that accounting is not just their business, it's their "passion." Same's true for a pharmaceutical company going after diabetes. More and more, I hear this word used to define the commitment of employees in various commercial enterprises. I pity the employee who hasn't mustered this passion despite her obvious competence.

From whom shall we expect this passion then?

Is it not enough to be deftly skilled and diligent with our work? We must also have a "passion" for it? Apparently so. No longer can we merely enjoy our work, grow in competence, and attend to challenges successfully. And if we cannot necessarily enjoy our work, then can we at least trade competence and reliability for compensation?

No. Now, considering the full understanding of the word "passion," we must harbor one of two possible attitudes toward our work: We must either "suffer and endure pain" for our work, e.g., be crucified by it for some greater purpose. Or we must be in constant "throes of sexual ecstasy" as we go about our work. Between the two, I guess I'd opt for the latter, though I don't know how well that would go over in my line of work, nor can I imagine how I'd get through the day even if my employer approved of my new-found gusto.

But just imagine, say, the Bank of America building in San Francisco. From every office, at all times, comes "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

What could get done in such a place? What would meetings be like? And consider the effect on company morale if Barbara experiences a crucifying "Oh, my God" while in the next office, Bob experiences multiple orgasms . . . all day long.

Okay, okay, I know, with its current usage, the flames of "passion" -- whether they inflict pain or provoke climax (or both . . . for some?) -- have been doused so that, now, our "passion" need only be, what? A fanatical commitment to our work to the detriment and possible exclusion of other aspects of our lives?

Song of the Month or Week

"El Microfono" by the Mexican Institute of Sound. Very much fun.

Great Lines or Paragraphs From What I'm Reading

". . . I give you the fair-minded American patriot Josiah Quincy of Boston. In the 1760's he boldly opposed the British occupation, but when a mob of Bostonians tormented British troops into shooting some of them -- the Boston Massacre, it was called -- and the troops were charged with murder, he and John Adams defended the redcoats and saved their lives. Remember when American leaders did things like that? The country [at that time] wasn't just threatened by jackleg terrorists, it was occupied by an army, and yet people like Quincy and Adams felt strong enough to focus on due process -- to resist the occupation but still identify with the occupiers as people. Those were the days."

-- Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

Today . . . I Was Offered My First Senior Discount!

Today, at the age of 55, I was, for the first time, offered a Senior Discount. It was some youngster at the front desk at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum.

"Are you a member?" she asked as I proposed to purchase a ticket.

No," I replied.

"Cal employee or student?" she continued.

"I'm nobody," I said.

"Senior discount?" she offered.



I chuckled and asked, "What age should I have reached to qualify for the senior discount?"

"65," she said, looking right at me.

Amused, I smiled and asked, "What made you think I'm in the senior discount category?"

"Oh, we'd just take your word for it," she kindly offered.

She was charming, so, no, I didn't respond with, "Just take my WORD for it? What is about what you see here that would make you BELIEVE I'm 65 . . . or OLDER?!!!!!?"


The museum was $8 for non-seniors. $6.50 for seniors. Not being good with money, I didn't see my opportunity at the time. Nor did I reflect upon the fact that this was a milestone event in my life: my first offer of a senior discount.

I just said, "I've a ways to go to hit 65, but from your perpective it must be like looking at the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building from the sidewalk between them. Hard to tell which is taller."

"Yeah, I can't tell," she laughed, still looking right at me. In this moment, she was merely acknowledging what she must have considered our shared plight: the inability to make a distinction between 55 and 65. She wasn't being rude because she's not only unable to make a physiological distinction; she's not capable of discerning an emotional distinction between 55 and 65 either. From her perspective, if you're 55 . . . you might as well just be 65, 75, dead. It's all one big undifferentiated horror.

She gave me a ticket. I reached and took it without difficulty. One day, my hand will tremble a bit.


It was much later that I noted the milestone, but I also noted that it shouldn't surprise me. I was dressed in 3 shirts, a jacket, jeans, and a hat because it was cold outside. Or was it? I had noticed in the morning so many young people around Cal wearing far less clothing, sitting outside, riding bikes, and I had asked myself: "Is it cold, objectively, so that most humans would regard it as cold, or am I cold because I'm getting old? Do I have less energy to fight off the elements?"

Now, if I'm asking myself that question, then . . . .

Gotta keep a sense of humor about this aging thing.

Does being a curmudgeon, to the extent that I am, have an effect upon my face so that it makes me look older than I am. (What's the word for psychological conditions which slowly change the facial affect?)