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"And here is Earth, a bright-blue jewel glittering in our modest galaxy, wandering in the darkness like a tourist in a bad neighborhood, about to be mugged." From "Stephen Hawking is a Peeping Tom," in Essays.

The Critical Mass

May 13th, 2012 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: May 13

At 4:33 a.m., I heard the familiar coat-hanger-suspended muffler of my delivery guy creeping down the street, then the satisfying, heavy slap on the front stoop: The New York Times had arrived. And following a few weeks of time-consuming chaos that had altered all of my most-cherished routines, I was ready to read it.

1, The lead story opens with Kelsey Griffith, a 23-year-old who graduates today from Ohio Northern University, working two restaurant jobs to pay off a $120,000 college-loan debt at $900 a month. The numbers say that college grads will make more money over their lifetimes than those who don’t go on to higher education, yet they’re increasingly carrying life-crushing loans. And while Republicans insist they’re worried about saddling “our children and grandchildren” with national debt, they have no qualms about burdening the kids with a mountain of personal debt, as demonstrated by their decision last week to allow student-loan rates to rise precipitously. The Times story spends much time on Ohio colleges, and the recent actions of politicians such as Gov. John Kasich. According to the story, “There is an ideological and political tug of war as well. State Representative John Patrick Carney, a Democrat, said if legislators were serious about financing higher education they could find a way, like eliminating tax breaks for corporations. He noted that even as funds for higher education were being reduced, Mr. Kasich and the Republican-controlled Legislature eliminated the state’s estate tax, which will cost the state an estimated $7.2 million a year.”

2, Elmore Leonard is now officially irrelevant. “For years, it was a schedule as predictable as a calendar,” The Times writes in another front-page story. “Novelists who specialized in mysteries, thrillers and romance would write one book a year, output that was considered not only sufficient, but productive. The but the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book. They are trying to satisfy impatient readers  who have  become used to downloading any e-book they want at the touch of a button…. ”

3, As the Summer Olympics in London draws near, some residents of the city’s bleak public housing projects have been informed that their apartment buildings may be used as anti-terrorist posts. ” ‘It looked like one of those things where you get free pizzas through the post,’ Hilal Bozkurt said, describing the innocuous-looking leaflet that came through her mail slot recently. ‘But this was like, free missiles.’ Ms. Bozkurt said she did not think that a residential apartment building, even one made of concrete and built in the pugnacious Brutalist style of the 1960s, was a suitable place for a pop-up military base featuring surface-to-air weapons able to travel at three times the speed of sound and hit targets more than three miles away in less than eight seconds.”

4, In the Sunday Review, the smart political comic strip, The Strip, tackles Obama’s support of same-sex marriage with a killer final panel. “Oh No!” wails an elderly man, looking in a mirror at his bald, wrinkled, angry head. “I wasted my life obsessing over the lives of gay strangers!”

5, The Book Review tackles 808 pages of Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. I’m not sure how you can leave out Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller but include Dick Francis, but let’s try: The future author of racetrack thrillers was in fact a jockey as a young man, and once had a horse collapse beneath him just yards from victory. The horse’s distress, according to author John Sutherland, was a case of gas “so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast.” And on to the typewriter you go, Mr. Francis.

6, Also in the Sunday Review, “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths,’ exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication and manipulation.’ (The proportion at large is one percent),” writes essayist William Deresiewicz. “Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.” Deresiewicz then goes on to wonder why anyone is surprised by this. I am only surprised that the number is so low.

7, Oh, and how timely: In the magazine, the headline reads “Psychologists now believe fledgling psychopaths can be identified as early as kindergarten. The hope is to teach these kids empathy before it’s too late.” I’d read the story but, actually, it is too late.

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Posted in The New York Times |

The Critical Mass

May 9th, 2012 by Jeff

The planet Mercury is too damn hot for writers

A rapt crowd, eager to get back to the sangria bar, listens as I read from "Chasing the Wind." Photo by Jon Gary.

A rapt crowd, eager to get back to the sangria bar, listens as I read from "Chasing the Wind." Photo by Jon Gary.

Three hours isn’t long, after you’ve spent two years wrestling and cajoling a project into shape. It had been two years since I first sat down with an old sailor – Ernie Coleman was 93 at the time – talking about his life, then taking his words home with me and fashioning them into a narrative of one man’s life in a tumultuous century. Then I spent months – since December – nailing down the details on self-publishing Chasing the Wind: The Humble, Epic Century of a Sailor.

Now it was Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in Java’s at the Market, in the Rochester Public Market, signing copy after copy after copy of Chasing the Wind. About 90 in all, I think it was. Ernie right beside me, signing as well.  In three hours, I saw 150, 200 people – I don’t know the number – grazing over the vast spread of food prepared that morning by Margaret. Caprese salad on a stick, tortellini, cheeses, olives, pineapple and ham skewers, sangria. And the salmon I’d smoked the day before. Kinloch Nelson played guitar, Patrick Flanigan read a letter from the mayor about Ernie and people applauded, I read an excerpt from a chapter and people laughed and cheered. People took photos and they congratulated me, even though all I’d done was what I’ve been doing for years. Write.

I was proud. Because I think the book, and Ernie, deserve the attention. I went home that evening, some of the neighbors came over, and I sat on the deck, a fire flickering in the chiminea, and drank wine until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.

I thought I’d be done by now with Chasing the Wind. Not so. I’m on Channel 16 – the WHAM morning news show – Thursday at 7:15 in the morning. I have a reading at noon Wednesday at Writers & Books. Looks like more interviews and readings are on the way. You can buy it on amazon.com, but I’ve got to get the book into local stores now. Make it an impulse buy, like The National Enquirer at the checkout counter. Except it’s good for you to read the story of a guy who lived through the Great Depression, and rebuilt his life after a divorce and the death of two wives, and who adopted a daughter and became the stepfather to seven kids, persevering through 95 years. And surviving the worst that mankind has to offer, a war in which Ernie’s ship was sunk during World War II, with the loss of more than 300 of his fellow crewmen, a horror so consuming that he still has nightmares about it, 70 years later.

Writing a book – assembling a sprawling, complex story – is new to me. I wonder… why did I wait so long? I’m 54 years old. Now I’m afraid I’ll run out of time.

Things have changed in the last couple of years. I write every day at home. Every day.  I have one completed novel that I’m trying to sell, I’m writing another non-fiction book, a second novel is half complete; that one, it’s my magnum opus. I may never finish it. Everything feels like a possibility. Every scrap of conversation that I hear on the bus while riding to and from work is a spark.

I saw on Sunday, three hours isn’t long. And I see now, 24 hours, that’s not enough either. There are not enough hours in the day. The average day on the planet Mercury is 58 hours long. That would do. But the temperature can reach 800 degrees. That’s too damn hot for writers.

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Posted in Books |

The Critical Mass

May 1st, 2012 by Jeff

Finally: It’s my first book, “Chasing the Wind”

chasingPeople – Mom, that’s you – have been asking me, “When are you gonna write a book?”

OK, I’ve got one. It’s probably not what most folks familiar with my writing were expecting. That novel of an evil jazz band in a dystopian world is half finished. Nevertheless, I’m immensely proud of Chasing The Wind: The Humble, Epic Century of a Sailor. And you know what that means: Party! We’ll celebrate the book’s release from 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday, May 6, at Java’s at the Market, at the Rochester Public Market, on South Union Street.

When Ernie Coleman’s stepdaughter contacted me about writing his biography, I thought: Yeah, that’s just how I want to spend my summer, writing a sentimental tale about a 93-year-old man beloved by his family and the Lake Ontario sailing community.

But Erie Coleman’s life story got under my skin. It was so dramatic, and yet so common. This would be a small, thoughtful book about a guy swept up in a century of big and little moments. He was a carpenter who built things, and repeatedly had to rebuild his life over his nine decades. A child of The Great Depression, witness to Prohibition and the emergence of radio, TV, jet travel, computers. Married four times, with two wives dying tragically. Acquiring seven stepchildren along the way, and one adopted daughter whose own tragic life underscored the differences in generations and ultimately emphasized Ernie’s own compassion as she settled into her darkest moment.

You’ll learn a lot from Chasing the Wind. You’ll learn that 33,000 years ago, the glacial ice over Ernie’s house in Summerville was two miles deep. You’ll learn some handy sailing strategies, like watching for the appearance of “cat’s paws” on the lake surface. You’ll learn that the 250-foot tall twin smokestacks of the Russell Power Station on the shore of Lake Ontario were built in an exact north-south alignment so that sailors could set their compasses to them. You’ll learn that – if he’s curious enough – a man can crawl through the hollow tubes of Hawaiian volcanoes left behind by receding lava flows. You’ll read about heroin, the zoot suit riots, infidelity, love, death, going AWOL from the Navy and how a man can make a muffler out of a 5-inch artillery shell for a 1928 Dodge Victory Six.

But most importantly, I wanted to take the beauty of Ernie sailing on Lake Ontario these past seven decades and contrast it with the horror of an August night in 1942, when Ernie’s ship was sunk in the worst defeat ever inflicted on the U.S. Navy. I wanted to write about how Ernie survived that night. One thousand American and Australian navy men, including more than 300 of Ernie’s crew mates on the USS Vincennes, were not so fortunate in the Battle of Savo Island. But that story would be difficult to tell. Ernie, as is often the case with veterans, does not talk about his war experiences. Seventy years later, in his dreams, he can still hear his fellow sailors screaming in the burning water of the South Pacific.

Chasing the Wind has been elegantly self published by Ernie’s family. Sunday afternoon’s event at Java’s at the Market will include a short reading from the book, with the extraordinary Kinloch Nelson playing guitar. Chasing the Wind will be available for, I believe, $17, rounded up a tad to cover the tax, with Java’s friendly baristas  keeping the change. And Ernie Coleman, now 95, will be there to sign your copy.

If you can’t make it on Sunday, details on getting a copy of  Chasing the Wind are in the “Fresh Produce: Buy A Book!” section of this web site.

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The Critical Mass

Apr 22nd, 2012 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: April 22

Today’s coffee, a simple Colombian. First music of the day: Townes Van Zandt’s At the Window, on vinyl acquired yesterday at National Record Store Day.

1, “Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle,” is the lead story of the day. Perhaps you’re not surprised to read about “a campaign of bribery to win market dominance” waged by Wal-Mart de Mexico. But Wal-Mart officials in the United States took significant steps to keep the story secret once they’d gotten wind of illegal activities. Laws were broken in both Mexico and the U.S., but authorities were not notified.

2, A rotting log has been rolled over, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, nicknamed ALEC, has been exposed. Last week, as its activities came to light, the conservative group backed off from its endorsements of tighter voter identification regulations, anti-labor union policies and pro gun laws such as Stand Your Ground (too late for Trayvon Martin, the dead Florida teenager). ALEC turns out to be an organization of “not only corporations, but nearly 2,000 state legislators across the country,” The Times reports. Delving into the morass, the newspaper writes of how “The records offer a glimpse of how special interests effectively turn ALEC’s lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signaling how they should vote and collaborating on bills  affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes.” The organization creates “model bills” that lawmakers can introduce in their states and “sends talking points to its lawmakers to use when speaking publicly about issues like President Obama’s health care law. Last month, on the day that Supreme Court arguments on the law began, ALEC sent an e-mail to legislators with a bullet-point list of criticisms of it, to be used ‘in your next radio interview, town hall meeting, op-ed or letter to the editor.’”

3, A 51-year-old woman named Carolina Salguero purchased an oil tanker for $16,500 in 2006 because she believed it was important to preserve the vessel as a piece of history. It’s now tied up at  a Brooklyn dock. “Some ships run into icebergs and become 3D movie extravaganzas,” The Times writes.”Others disappear silently into the abyss of paperwork.” The 74-year-old Mary A. Whelan will soon be homeless. Salguero is just about of of money; it costs $5,000 a month just to park the ship somewhere, anywhere. “Of course it’s a romantic impediment,” Salguero says of her selfless task of preserving this 613-ton piece 0f maritime history. “‘Mother of a homeless oil tanker’ is not a label that encourages many fellows to step up.”

4, The government of the Republic of Georgia is building a futuristic “instant city” in the shore of the Black Sea, a city called Lazika that it says will be home to 1.5 million people in 10 years. Megelians, the ethnic group that has lived in that marshland for centuries, say that the planned skyscrapers would require 80-foot foundations. “Those are huge buildings,” said one resident. “I don’t know how the swamp will hold them.”

5, Alex Cassie has died at age 95. He was the British officer who produced many of the forged documents that his fellow prisoners of war used after they’d tunneled out of Stalag Luft III in eastern Germany, an exploit that inspired the Steve McQueen film The Great Escape. The real-life ending wasn’t particularly satisfying. Seventy-six prisoners got away, but 73 were recaptured and 50 executed on Hitler’s orders. Cassie, who suffered from claustrophobia, chose to stay behind.

6, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Sting, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton first learned to play guitar from the instructional manual Play in a Day. Bert Wheedon, the British studio musician who wrote the manual, has died at age 91. “As I travel up and down the country, I meet many groups who try to blast their way to success with too much noise and not enough talent,” Wheedon said in a 1997 interview with the British newspaper The Independent. Perhaps thinking of Pete Townshend, another famous guitarist who learned to play with his manual, Wheedon told The Independent, “I can’t understand why anyone should want to smash a cup and saucer, let alone a guitar.”

7, In the Sunday Review, essayist Andrew F. March nails the argument against social media. “We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”

8, A new argument by The Times editorial page against legislation being enacted  by some states: “Arizona’s cold-blooded immigration statute was enacted in 2010 to bring about ‘attrition through enforcement’ – to make life so harsh for undocumented immigrants that they would be driven out of the state. It invites unfettered racial profiling and the abuse of police power. And, if allowed to stand, it opens the door to states’ writing their own foreign policy, in defiance of the Constitution.”

9, “I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager, and never tried it again,” The Times reports Mitt Romney as saying last fall. In the essay “The Wrath of Grapes,” Timothy Egan makes a case, perhaps coincidental, that our better presidents were the one who drank. Drinkers: FDR, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams. Occasional tipplers: Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Non-drinkers, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter (who had all alcohol removed from the White House) and George W. Bush, “who seems doomed to have his name forever followed by, ‘and we know how that turned out,’” Egan writes.

10, For decades, a Russian-built clunker called the Lada was the family vehicle of necessity in Finland. The cars had two selling points: They were cheap, and had a good heater. The Automobiles page interviews Risto Nykanen, a Fin who restores Ladas. “For everyday use, Mr. Nykanen owns a sporty two-door Opel,” The Times writes. “But its computerized innards do not fully impress him. ‘If a nuclear bomb goes off, all microchips will collapse,’” he said. He affectionately tapped the hood of one of his Ladas, a washed-out gray 1974  sedan. ‘Well, this is one model that has no chips inside,’ he said. ‘It’s all mechanical. It’s atom-bomb proof,’”

11, The Columnist is the third play about the newspaper industry – all based on true stories – to open this season in New York, following The Wood, about Daily News columnist Mike McAlary, and CQ/CX, about a Times reporter who was exposed as having made up fake sources for his reporting.  Starring John Lithgow and written by Pulitzer Prize winning David Auburn, The Columnist is about Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, a hawkish supporter of the Vietnam War. Alsop dismissed war critics as “misguided young crusaders and Communist sympathizers among the press corps” even as the helicopters were landing on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon to remove the last of our personnel. Auburn says he was inspired to write the play while reading contemporary pundits’ similarly mistaken cheerleading of the invasion of Iraq. “Noting the unwillingness of many of those involved to recognize their errors,” The Times writes, “he found himself wondering: ‘How do you arrive at that point when you are so firmly committed to a particular point of view that nothing will dissuade you or force you to re-examine it?’”

12, The Avenging Conscience, the upcoming film starring John Cusack as Edgar Allen Poe, is the 241st film or TV show to feature Poe or his work.

13, In the magazine, we learn that the city museum of Waycross, Ga., features a mummified dog that had been trapped inside the hollow trunk of a tree.

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Posted in The New York Times |

The Critical Mass

Apr 21st, 2012 by Jeff

Low-effort thinking in the 21st century

Woman Picking Out Fruit in Supermarket has made her much-sought endorsement.

Woman Picking Out Fruit in Supermarket has made her much-sought endorsement.

Al Franken’s re-election campaign has just introduced high-level satire of the first order.

Franken, the former comedian, now serious senator, retains a sense of satire as dangerously sharp as David Sedaris swinging a scythe at a church picnic. “Hello, I’m Woman Picking Out Fruit In Supermarket,” read an e-mail sent to Franken supporters, which included this image of a woman picking out fruit in the supermarket. “And I’m writing to you today on behalf of Al Franken – a Senator who stands up for real people (including those of us who make a living posing for stock photos).”

You get these mailings all of the time. Not only from politicians, but from your doctor, from colleges, from community theater groups. Mailings illustrated with photos of smiling, confident people, generally asking for money. These are stock photos, available for purchase by anyone who needs to surround their cause with smiling, confident people. Woman Picking Out Fruit In Supermarket proudly points out that Tattooed Guitar Player, Guy Wearing Hard Hat and Elderly Couple Sitting At Kitchen Table are also actual people “worried about the right-wing attacks on my access to health care.” So you should vote for Al Franken, who’s up for re-election. “Al’s a Senator I can count on to stand up for all women,” says Woman Picking Out Fruit In Supermarket, “whether they’re walking a golden retriever in the park, pointing at a chart in an important meeting, or simply staring into the camera.”

Good luck, Al. Great, subtle comedy is a lost art.

Franken’s fundraising joke illustrates a serious problem. We are too comfortable with people misleading us. Often, we don’t even see it.

Can you believe that Republicans, including Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, were still claiming last week that Barack Obama’s birth certificate might be a fake? Or how about Florida Congressman Allen West insisting, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party.” Or, before dropping out of the race for Republican nomination for president, Rick Santorum claiming “the California universities — I think it’s seven or eight of the California system of universities — don’t even teach an American history course. It’s not even available to be taught.”

Not only are those three claims wrong, but it’s very easy to verify that they are wrong. And each week, we’re forced to wade through dozens of such nonsensical pronouncements from ill-informed leaders. Actually, it’s less about them being ill informed than it is about them figuring we’re too stupid to know the difference.

The intellectual center of stupidity in this country on any one day might be Arizona, which has just passed a law that declares a fetus to be a human two weeks before conception. That’s right: Two weeks before conception. The next day, the intellectual center of stupidity might be Tennessee, which has just passed a law that allows teachers to label as controversial such indisputable scientific facts such as evolution and climate change, thus allowing articles of faith to enter the classroom. Articles of faith are arguments that have no visible means of support beyond a belief that something must be true, simply because you believe it to be so. That includes religious arguments (intelligent design) and political arguments (industry and automobiles have not been proven to be responsible for global warming). No wonder American students are falling behind other countries in science studies; we can’t expect them to be smarter than their school boards.

Defenders of the new Tennessee law insist that allowing a student to argue in class that God created man because the Bible tells him so adds to a more-robust discussion.

OK then. I have contrarian ideas that I’d like to see discussed in Tennessee classrooms.

A study in the journal Psychological Science concludes that children who score low on intelligence tests tend to grow up into socially conservative adults. The study speculates that orderly conservative ideologies make our complex world easier to understand. Somewhat similarly, the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has found a link between conservative beliefs and what the report calls “low-effort thinking.” Now, “low-effort thinking” doesn’t simply mean you’re stupid. University of Arkansas psychologist Dr. Scott Eidelman, who headed the study, writes that “People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response.”

Distracting someone while they’re trying to think, the authors of the study conclude, generally leads to that person accepting conservative viewpoints. So when Ted Nugent was at an NRA convention last week, yelling about cutting off people’s heads, such distracting behavior explains why so many gun nuts struggle with forming rational thoughts about gun control.

“Keeping people from thinking too much… or just asking them to deliberate or consider information in a cursory manner can impact people’s political attitudes, and in a way that consistently promotes political conservatism,” Dr. Eidelman wrote.

Class dismissed. But first, does anyone know where I can find a stock photo of Low-Effort Thinking Tennessee Lawmaker Pointing to Drawing of Dinosaur in Bible?

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Posted in Politics |

The Critical Mass

Apr 15th, 2012 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: April 15

Today’s coffee is the last of the Mexican Oaxaca. Sigh. First music of the day: The late jazz drummer Paul Motian’s Flux and Change.

1, “White House Opens Door to Big Donors, and Lobbyists Slip in,” is the lead story today. Sounds alarming. Obama, like the Republicans he is running against, is courting big-money donors, many of whom have visited the White House. These guests bring along lobbyist friends. Yet, as the first president to regularly release the White House visitor logs (former Vice President Dick Cheney notoriously ordered his visitor logs destroyed), Obama is not acting like a man who has something to hide. After reading the long story, I didn’t find a smoking gun pointing to rampant influence peddling. In fact, The Times story seems to shoot itself in the foot when it concedes, “it is clear that in some cases the administration came down against the policies being sought by the visitors.” It’s a reality that influential people will always have access to the president, and they like to write big checks. Another reality is, Obama lives in the political machinery that we invented.

2, Rich Chinese tourists are coming to America to buy shoes! On average, they spend $6,000 each on every trip here (visitors from other countries average $4,000) and the Commerce Department says their No. 1 activity is shopping.

3, “The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-stable lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates,” The Times reports. It is a phenomena that “some European newspapers have started calling ’suicide by economic crisis.’ ”

4, Lester Breslow died at his Los Angeles home last week. His statistical studies proved that people live longer if they have healthy habits. The Times obituary reports that “a 45-year-old with at least six of the seven healthy habits Dr. Breslow chose as important had a life expectancy 11 years longer than someone with three or fewer.” Those healthy habits? “Do not smoke; drink in moderation; sleep seven to eight hours; exercise at least moderately; eat regular meals; maintain a moderate weight; eat breakfast.” Dr. Breslow was anecdotal evidence of his theory’s truth; he was 97.

5, Your taxes will go up in 2013. Social programs will be cut. It is inevitable.”The tax increases and spending cuts are the result of Washington’s having previously kicked the can down the road, to use a phrase that is popular here,” writes Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt. “Rather than pass a plan to cut the deficit, policy makers have put off tough decisions. With the Bush tax cuts, lawmakers deliberately made them temporary, to avoid running afoul of budget rules intended to hold down the deficit.” In short, we’re screwed because our decision makers were afraid to do what we sent them to Washington to do: make tough decisions.

6, Nicholas D. Kristof opens his column with this stunning statement: “For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.”

7, In the Book Review, writer David Sedaris is asked what writer, living or dead, he’d like to meet. “I’m horrible at meeting people I admire, but if I could go back in time, I’d love to collect kindling or iron a few shirts for Flannery O’Connor. After I’d finished, she’d offer to pay me, and I’d say, awe-struck, my voice high and quivering, that it was on me.”

8, In Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places, we learn of “spadefoot toads, chorusing together to confuse predators of any individual location,” reviewer Jeremy Denk writes. “When a jet flies overhead, the toads get out of sync. The temporary lack of ensemble proves deadly: soon hawks swoop down on the individual choristers.”

9, On this 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic are a few new books, including Andrew Wilson’s Shadow of the Titanic. “Life after the Titanic was rife with repression, depression, social withdrawal and ’survivor guilt,’” writes reviewer Holly Morris. “At least 10 who escaped in lifeboats comitted suicide in the ensuing years.”

10, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow’s book Drift is positively reviewed. Maddow’s basic thesis is, war is now too easy. The citizenry never feels the cost, in either dollars or blood. We should raise taxes to properly pay for our wars, Maddow argues, because “going to war, being at war, should be painful for the entire country, from the start.”

11, The magazine explores 76-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning writer Robert Caro, who has, the story’s headline tells us, “spent 36 years and 3,388 pages telling the story of Lyndon Johnson. He is nowhere near done.” Johnson is an amazing story, often overlooked as president, but consider the era in which he dominated Washington: civil rights, the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination.  Next month Caro’s fourth volume on Johnson will be published. “In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better – or to understand him better – than Johnson knew or understood himself,” writes Charles McGrath. “He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for is penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.”

12, Also in the magazine, Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, does a Q&A. I don’t care at all for that show’s moronic patter; Co-host Joe Scarborough sometimes surprises, but generally takes the low Republican road. And the guests are unreliable pundits such as Mark Halperin and, until recently, the demonstrably racist Pat Buchanan. But Brzezenski comes off as the anti-perky morning host. “I proudly own that,” she says of her ornery streak. And I loved this response to a question of growing up as the daughter of Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and how her mother served a high-profile dinner party roadkill meat from a deer she had found dead on the street and butchered herself:  “She absolutely knows who she is, and doesn’t give a damn about what you think. She came here during World War II and starved for a year eating nuts in an orphanage. You don’t waste good meat. And if anyone wants to argue with her on that, I would suggest you don’t do it while she’s holding a chain saw.”

13, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays the vice president in the HBO comedy Veep: “We live in a culture now where it’s almost like we are used to being lied to.”

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Posted in The New York Times |

The Critical Mass

Apr 14th, 2012 by Jeff

Grandma Spevak’s ghosts

Grandma Spevak’s house on Wheelock Avenue had a few ghosts in it. Not in any poltergeist sense, but in the way that long-gone, often unknown relatives lingered on the walls, and in the conversations among the adults. I remember hanging on one of the walls was an old, oval-shaped portrait – I think it was a black-and-white photo – of a young man in a turn-of-the-last-century military uniform. The kind of plain uniform worn by the lower ranks . Privates and corporals. He was a distant relation, Grandma said. A soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He’d gone off to fight in World War I, and at some point was never heard from again. Perhaps he’s buried, nameless, in some mass grave in Belgium or France. Europe’s full of them.

RMS Titanic, in better days.

RMS Titanic, in better days.

Europe’s tragedies have filled that land with ghosts. That’s one reason that it has generally steered clear of wars since World War II, unless some cowboy American president dupes England’s prime minister into following us into places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

As we note the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic this evening, I recall that it, too, was a ghost that sailed through Grandma Spevak’s house. As a little kid, I remember listening to her talking about the doomed ship. I imagine it’s one powerful reason I’ve always been interested in big ships and the tragedies that often surround them. As an elementary school student, I sketched pictures of sunken ships. Some years ago at my parents’ house, I came across a drawing done by my brother and I. It was a simple crayon seascape of clouds and ocean waves, and nothing else. It was entitled “At the Titanic.”

As best I remember it, here’s the story told by Grandma Spevak:

Some of the Spevaks – apparently the word is Slovak for “singer” – were migrating to America in the early part of the century. Grandma Spevak’s father, a great-grandfather of mine who I never knew, was already there and sent for the rest of his family. They left Austria-Hungary and traveled east to meet the ship that was to take them to America. I don’t know if the port was Southampton, England, from where the ship sailed, or Cherborg, France, where it stopped briefly. But the Spevaks didn’t have enough money to book passage. It sailed without them, and they returned home. Happily so, I remember my grandmother saying. Many of the family members hadn’t wanted to leave home for America anyway.

A year later, they’d put together enough money to come to America on the S.S. George Washington. They were poor immigrants, and could only afford space in steerage, in the depths of the ship. But Grandma Spevak, who was a little girl at the time, remembers coming out on deck to play. She tripped and fell on one such occasion, cutting herself. Grandma told of how a rich woman used her silk handkerchief to stop the bleeding. When Grandma had returned below decks, her mother – that would have been my great grandmother, another relative I never knew – had her daughter wash the blood from the handkerchief, return topsides, find the rich woman and return the handkerchief.

The George Washington arrived at New York City, discharging its rich passengers at the wharf, while the immigrants were shuttled off to Ellis Island. The Spevaks then continued the journey to the Cleveland suburb of Bedford, Ohio. Because that’s where so many of their relatives and fellow countrymen had settled.

And that ship that they couldn’t afford to board a year earlier? News reports being so intermittent, and illiteracy so prevalent, that until they arrived in America they didn’t even hear of what had happened to the Titanic.

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The Critical Mass

Apr 13th, 2012 by Jeff

Dr. Strangelove and the 1 Percenters

Now, if we could pour about 10 feet of cement over the top of this, the little critters would never get out.

Now, if we could pour about 10 feet of cement over the top of this, the little critters would never get out.

For those of us who believe that Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the finest films of all time, this week’s news out of Salina, Kan., is further proof that truth mimics fiction:

Tucked deep beneath the Kansas prairie, luxury condos are being built into the shaft of an abandoned missile silo to service anxious – and wealthy – people preparing for doomsday.

So far, four buyers have plopped down a total of about $7 million for havens to flee to when disaster happens or the end is nigh. And developer Larry Hall has options to retro-fit three more Cold War-era silos when this one fills up.

That’s from the AFP news service. Forbes magazine and other outlets have also reported on these converted Atlas-F, atom-bomb proof missile-silos, of which 70 were built. The original walls are nine feet thick and go down 174 feet. Inside this shaft, a steel and concrete core has been added, which makes them more earthquake proof.

When the first silo is complete, it will be 14 underground floors, seven of which will be condos. Other floors will feature a pool, a movie theater, a library, a medical center and a school.

More ambiance: The windows will be video screens with views of Paris, New York, a beach, a forest or whatever the mood calls for. The doomsday condos will have top-end appliances, walk-in closets, a kitchen and dining area and two living rooms.

Air and electricity will be supplied by  conventional power sources, as well as windmills and generators. Water, filtered through carbon and sand, will be stored in large underground tanks. Each silo will have an indoor farm to grow fish and vegetables for 70 people indefinitely, along with a five-year stockpile of dry goods.

The top floor and an outside building above it will be an elaborate security system that includes an elevator activated by fingerprint recognition and a camera-monitored barbed-wire fence to greet the hordes of 99 percenters who weren’t visionary enough to have purchased one of these babies themselves. “If they try to climb the fence we can stun them,” Hall says. “If they want to break into the system, we can put an end to that.”

This peace of mind from pandemics, economic collapse, terrorism, food shortages, war, global warming, strange weather and other disasters sells for $2 million a floor, $1 million a half floor.

Hall, who lives in Denver, worries that sun flare activity will disrupt the worldwide power grid and result in complete anarchy. Until that happens, he says he and his family will use their missile silo condo as a vacation home.

It’s like the scene near the end of Dr. Strangelove, as President Muffley, played by Peter Sellers, listens to a plan to preserve the government of the United States in the advent of nuclear attack, as proposed by Dr. Strangelove, also played by Sellers:

“Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess… that ah, dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided….

“A computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition….

“Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But, ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, 10 females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, 20 years….

“I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.”

The really awesome aspect of Strangelove’s scheme is that it was taken, in some cases word for word, from actual government civil defense plans of the day. Fiction also mimics truth.

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The Critical Mass

Mar 26th, 2012 by Jeff

The irony of Dick Cheney and the Affordable Health Care law

So…. Dick Cheney does have a heart.

The former vice president received a heart transplant last week.  Let’s set aside all of the ill feelings that he seemed to revel in creating when he was Bush’s right-hand man and wish him a successful recovery. Everyone deserves to live a long, healthy life.

The timing is ironic, of course. This week the United States Supreme Court is hearing arguments as to whether Barack Obama’s Affordable Health Care law is constitutional. The argument being brought against it by the states that have filed this suit is that the Federal government has no right to compel citizens to buy a product.

Republicans argue that citizens should be allowed to shop for their own health insurance deals. They claim a competitive market will keep prices down. But that’s the system we live under now, and have been forced to live with for decades. And compared to the rest of the civilized world, our health care is expensive and – particularly if you’re poor – ineffective.

Republicans frame the argument as being a matter of protecting our freedom. But we’re not free if we’re not healthy, and if we’re saddled with the kind of crushing personal debt that causes families to lose their homes. Republicans throw around scare words like “socialism.” But your police force is socialism. Your military is socialism. Your public schools are socialism.

You’re required to buy a seat beat for your car, and wear it. Because it’s good for you. We’re merely being asked to buy insurance, create a larger pool of contributors, so that everyone can afford it. It will be good for us.

Can anyone explain what is the difference between Social Security and Medicare – two social programs that Americans dearly love – and universal health care coverage? It’s all the same idea; looking out for each other, making sure we have access to basic human needs.

Dick Cheney has survived numerous health issues, including five heart attacks, and now has a new heart because he is a wealthy 71-year-old man who enjoys the marvelous health coverage awarded to all members and former members of Congress. Without all of that, he would have been dead long ago. What the Affordable Health Care law does is finally begin moving all of us in the right direction. Because everyone – Dick Cheney included – deserves to live a long, healthy life.

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The Critical Mass

Mar 25th, 2012 by Jeff

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: March 25

This morning’s coffee is Mexican Oaxaca, imported last week from Austin. Is that a hint of vanilla? First music of the day: A three-CD set of Townes Van Zandt.

1, Last fall at Ruidoso Downs Race Track in New Mexico, “a national champion jockey named Jacky Martin lay sprawled in the furrowed dirt just past the finish line, paralyzed, his neck broken in three places,” The Times writes in a front-page expose of the sport. “On the ground next to him his frightened horse, leg broken and chest heaving, was minutes away from being euthanized on the track. For finishing fourth on this early September day last year, Jacky Martin got about $60 and possibly a lifetime tethered to a respirator.” Not exactly a Run for the Roses. “On average, 24 horses die each week at racetracks across America,” The Times writes. “Many are inexpensive horses racing with little regulatory protection in pursuit of bigger and bigger prizes. These deaths often go unexamined, the bodies shipped to rendering plants and landfills rather than to pathologists who might have discovered why the horses broke down.” There’s something soul-less about how some factions of humanity move imperiously about this planet, as though how we treat animals doesn’t tell us anything about ourselves. The day after Jacky Martin’s accident, on the same track, another horse broke its leg and had to be put down, “then dumped near an old toilet in a junk yard a short walk from where he had been sold at auction the previous year.”

2, The European recession is resulting in government funding for the arts. This impacts more than American tourists. “In contrast to the United States,” The Times writes, “Europe has embraced a model that views culture not as a commodity, in which market forces determine which products survive, but as a common legacy to be nurtured and protected, including art forms that may lack mass appeal.”

3, “Dolphins in Barataria Bay off Louisiana, which was hit hard by the BP oil spill in 2010, are seriously ill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday.  The agency said that it was likely that the dolphins’ ailments were related to toxic substances in the petroleum, although evidence of a link was not conclusive.”

4, “For decades, Republicans have recruited outside groups and individuals to amplify their party’s message and its influence,” writes Kevin Baker in a Sunday Review essay. “They have carried this off brilliantly, helping to shift the political spectrum in the United States significantly to the right.” But now these outsiders, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, have outgrown the fading, aging party. TV access is more prized than political office. ‘Two of the most-popular Republican candidates for president going into the race, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, declined to run rather than jeopardize their shows,” Baker writes. “Newt Gingrich turned much of his campaign into book tours for himself and his wife. Ask yourself which was more likely: that Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann thought they could be elected president, or that they were looking to preserve their ‘brand?’ ” Baker notes that “their candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to remake the party from within.”

5, Don’t be fooled into thinking there’s an actual debate over whether Israel should conduct an air strike against Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Nicholas D. Kristof points out that “it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change – credible experts are overwhelmingly on one side.” Against. As Kristof writes, “anyone who is confident about what would happen is a fool.”

6, A California man, Gilad Elbaz, has built an Internet company, called Factual, whose goal is very simple: Store every fact known to man. “The world is one big data problem,” he says. “What if you could spot any error, as soon as you wrote it? Factual is definitely a new thing that will change business, and a valuable new tool for computing.”

7, While we’re on the subject of storing facts, Vincent Kartheiser, the actor who plays Peter Campbell on the AMC series Mad Men, does a quick Q&A in the Sunday Review. As to what he is reading, Campbell cites Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music. “It’s an interesting world the writer has created,” Kartheiser says. “Memory is stored externally from your body so you’re constantly asking this box what you know. It’s interesting because it was written in the ’90s, and it’s kind of where we’re going as a society. I think eventually we will have external hard drives that store our emotion and our memories.”

8, More Kartheiser: “I’m an adult, I don’t do blogs, I’m not a fan of the Twitter. I’m not a fan of the Facebook. I’m vehemently anti- actually. I think those things are  – stupid.”

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