Trickle Down Sex

by Dennis Green

What is that white, creamy stuff tricklimg down your leg? No cheating, now! No peeking.

Ah, the sex life! It keeps us goin’ and sometimes drives us crazy. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve had way more than my share and didn’t start enjoying the opposite sex any sooner than my contemporaries. Can you say “Hound Dawg”? Contrary to Catholic doctrine, I didn’t always do so for the purposes of procreation, or with the Pope’s blessing. I even, more often than not, used birth control or respected my partner for doing so.

We’ve gone through a number of sexual revolutions since I grew up in the Fifties, when making out, petting and “dry humping” were as often as not the order of the day….ur…rather, the evening or very early hours of the morning, usually in an automobile, sometimes the back seat, sometimes the front, especially if you had a bench seat and no four-on-the-floor.

And I was almost 40 when I finally learned how to do it right. A wonderful lover hinted that the best sex she’d ever had was with a man who went REALLY SLOW, and, as she put it, “It was marvelous!” So, that first Saturday we spent in bed together, I became Slow Hand Luke and stayed in first gear for the rest of the festivities. Ten times.

And yes, I know some women like it fast and hard and faster and harder! I’m adaptable.

And sometimes, it’s all the better the more illicit it is. Place can be a factor, time of day, marital status, even religion. I remember one noontime, in the Berkeley Hills, in full view of the road, with a married woman who was a devout Baptist and a former student…well, you get the idea. Joy to the World!

As for gay sex, I’ve never been there, but the funniest comment I ever heard came from the comedienne Sarah Silverman, who, while watching her little dog licking his own penis, remarked, “Let’s face it — gay sex, straight sex — it’s all pretty GROSS when you think about it!”

Gross or not, most of us really dig it, and don’t mind the trickle down part. Isn’t that what Kleenex is for? And sometimes that stuff perpetuates the human species, and I suppose that’s what all the evolutionary, genetic programming is about, but clearly, there’s an opt-out gene, or even several. Some folks are just asexual, and others aren’t into cross-gender sex. All these wonders in our DNA!

Once I learned the techniques, some of my favorite memories are the hours I spent just giving pleasure. I knew, intuitively, that if I gave pleasure, I didn’t have to worry about getting my own in return. In all those years, I had only one partner with whom I was so incompatible that it didn’t work, in either direction. And sadly to say, I married her! Before I discovered the horrible truth, on our wedding night, after an elaborate church wedding. Yikes!

My boyz are in their late twenties now, and I don’t give them any advice, let alone hints about sex. Oh, we watched enough movies together, less than XXX-rated, that they had a pretty good idea what it’s all about, and never asked any questions. And both of them are single. I think I talked enough about the importance of birth control while they were growing up that they won’t be caught in a parent trap of their own.

We live now in very strange times. I visit places where the sexes intermingle and sometimes go home together, or are an item, or a settled couple, even married. The younger women seem curiously indifferent, more into “Way!” and “Like…” than “I Love You.” I suspect the latest sexual revolution is one where the act itself just isn’t such a big deal. Too bad!

©2010 Dennis Green

Snark City

by Dennis Green

So, just for the hell of it, I visited two of the marginal blogs focused on Alameda, Michele Ellson's "The Island," and Lauren Do's "Blogging Bayport Alameda." Both profess to be legitimate, journalistic news sites, not just the usual sloppy blogs we all know and sometimes love.

What I found there was a profound lack of civility, by the blogsters toward their subject matter, making bitter and personal attacks on people they don't like, such as the Interim City Manager, Anne Marie Gallant, and City Attorney Teresa Highsmith. Their snarky tone and attitude is shared by most of the posters on their discussion threads. Boy, was I a hit! I haven’t seen bullies like this since the third grade.

I also discovered what a tiny, out of touch and thoughtless minority they are, still crying in favor of Measure B, SunCal's proposal to develop Alameda Point, the former Naval Air Station, which was defeated at the polls in March, 85/15 percent of those voting. That would be about 3,000 yea voters in a town of almost 80,000 people, or about .075 percent.

I figure that those who voted for B were mostly Newbies, people who bought houses here in the last 5-10 years, and maybe they’re so angry because they paid too much. But I wasn't prepared for how insular and out of touch they really are. They are talking to themselves, and are as inarticulate as my students in Bonehead English were. They all have opinions and wild speculations, but no facts, and we all know that old saying… ”Everyone has an opinion, and opinions are like ‘armpits’ and smell just about as bad.” (Censorship mine.)

They are also uniquely unfair, most of them backing the other recently defeated initiative, the new and horrendous school parcel tax, Measure E. It would have shifted the burden away from the Gold Coast, in a regressive tax costing those McMansions no more than a poor little cottage on the West End, and the big mall little more than some local small retail businesses.

This is not the Alameda I know and love. That Alameda is good-natured, civil in it's debates and user-friendly.

The only news site that makes any sense is Alameda Action News, and the few Snarks who appear there, who persists in their arrogance and ignorance so well that no one takes them seriously, invite the good advice I once received: "Don't take the bait!"

Posters on those minority blogs don't get that, and especially the ones with pseudonyms. But that's okay. I won't miss all those Snarks, and if they show up on a site I'm still reading, I will just hope they remember that good old cop advice, "You have the right to remain silent." Otherwise, they'll just incriminate themselves!

I'm reminded of an experience I had about five years ago with writers groups. Julia Park, then editor and founding partner of the Alameda Sun where my column, Geezerville: A Wry Take On Aging, was being published every week or two, had been teaching night school, a writing class. Some of her students organized a writers group, and I was invited to join.

We were about 12 -- 15 strong, and met one Saturday morning a month. We rotated hosting and refreshment duties, and spent the morning listening to various members read a piece of work. Sometimes poetry, sometimes a short story, sometimes a chapter from a novel, a work in progress. Very bright, cordial, civil folks. I enjoyed our sessions and always had something to read.

One member lived on a houseboat, and meeting on his water craft/domicile was quite an adventure. One young woman lived in a house on the lagoon off Otis Drive, and that was fun too. We were quite a varied group, a few more women than men, one gay man, one fellow who taught at St. Mary's College, a minister, and so on.

And then I made the mistake of a lifetime. I had met a man, who seemed like a decent enough person, lively, talkative, outgoing. And I invited him to join the group. As it turned out, he was rude, argumentative, disruptive and had very little to contribute but venom. I never understood why that fellow was so angry, but within a few months, the cordial atmosphere of the writers group had been destroyed, and gradually, we disbanded.

My recent experience on the blog discussion threads reminded me of that sad time with the writers group. And how important civility is to any communal enterprise. Oddly enough, the guy who ruined the writers’ group is a regular on both those sites.

© 2010 Dennis Green

How Do You Ask The Last Man To Die?

by Dennis Green

John Kerry, in his testimony before the Fulbright Committee, in 1972, as a returned Vietnam Vet, said, “There are men dying there now, so that we don’t have to admit what the rest of the world knows, that it is a mistake. How do we ask men to die so that President Nixon, as he said in his own words, doesn’t have to be, ‘The first American President to lose a war.’? How do you ask the last man to die in Vietnam?”

I watched an old news clip of that testimony the other day, and it drove me to tears, remembering in a rush my fight to help end that war, seeing my own students drafted to fight and die there, seeing the returning vets, coming to UCSB on the G.I. Bill, and the tortured looks on their faces, seeing them today, in their sixties, still suffering the trauma and illnesses from that war.

I am also doing research for a story about President William McKinley, who opposed our entry into the Spanish-American War because he had served at Antietam in the Civil War, and seen, “Stacks of the war dead bodies.” And time after time we have gone into these unnecessary wars, squandering treasure and lives, in a seemingly childish lust for adventure.

In every instance, there was some bogus incident pushing the U.S. into war. “Remember the Maine!” was the cry of William Randolph Hearst to Teddy Roosevelt. But the Maine, it has been proven, was not blown up by a Spanish torpedo, but by its own boiler and ammunition stores. The Gulf of Tonkin incident got Vietnam efforts into a Surge. WMDs got us into Iraq. And now what is it, precisely, that keeps us in Afghanistan?

The Fulbright hearings into the Vietnam conflict didn’t even BEGIN until 1971. And we were not out of there until 1975. Today, Senator John Kerry is Chairman of the Senate Defense Committee, and recently ordered the release of 1,000 pages of testimony and investigative evidence about Vietnam. He appears poised to call for hearings into our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if such hearings begin, we are likely to hear some very startling things.

The hearings into BlackWater mercenary contractors were very disturbing, enough so that the company changed its name, if not its ways. The murder of innocent civilians in Iraq was only the worst of the charges against them. A number of U.S. soldiers have been charged with similar crimes in Afghanistan.

We will hear more about the use of drones in Pakistan, probably more than the Generals would want us to know. We’ll even get some intelligent news analysis on PBS from Need to Know, the Charlie Rose Show and on CNN from Farid Zakharia. And we will be reminded that when the media turned against the war in Vietnam, when Walter Cronkite told us it was unwinnable, LBJ decided to retire.

President Obama has left himself an exit strategy from Afghanistan, but will he use it? If he does not, his presidency, whether it ends in 2012 or 2016, will end in disgrace. He will be even more discredited than the man who got us into all this mess — President George W. Bush.

And the only thing that might stop John Kerry is a Republican takeover of the Senate. Don’t let that happen. My Libertarian leanings and he deaths of relatives and friends in combat have made me fiercely anti-War!

©2010 Dennis Green

Women & The Holocaust

by Dennis Green

The Nazi Beast in Holocaust memory is inevitably male. And yet, recent research shows that as many as 5,000 of concentration camp guards were women, nearly 10% of the force. The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has uncovered some very startling facts.

We tend to think, and like to think, that women are kind, nurturing, compassionate — not vicious or aggressive, as some men can be. But Lower’s research proves us wrong. Besides such notorious camp guards as Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, Lower has turned up such lesser known killers as Erna Petri, wife of an S.S. officer and mother, who was convicted of shooting six Jewish children in the head in a camp in Poland. And Johanna Atwater Zelle, a German secretary also found guilty of killing Jewish children.

Many of these women migrated to the eastern front, where genocide was going on quite openly. She estimates that they numbered in “the thousands.” Most did not bloody their own hands but cooperated in the systematic rounding up and slaughter of millions.

(And from my own admittedly limited personal experience, I can testify that “Anything we can do they can do better!”)

Such startling revelations about gender do more than merely highlight the extent to which the Nazi mentality and machinery infected the German people. Many who participated in the Hitler Youth Corps are still alive, and still in denial about national socialism and their nation’s sins.

In 1964, I was living in Isla Vista with my first wife, Linda. She had just earned her M.S. at Cal Berkeley, where I had taken a year off from my own studies to work in a gas station on University Ave. Linda got a great lab job at UCSB’s Biology Department, and we were flush with savings, so rented a very nice apartment on the ground floor less than a block from the northern edge of campus.

Our landlady was an immigrant from Germany, a nice enough middle-aged woman, small in stature but outgoing and talkative. One day, she confessed to me that she had been an active member of the Hitler Youth Corps herself. “We marched proudly in our uniforms, and worked small gardens inside the city of Berlin, like your own ‘Victory Gardens’ I believe.”

“What were you thinking?” I asked.

“Deutschland Uber Alles!” she replied. “The glory that was the Third Reich. Ours was the most powerful nation on earth. One day, I even marched past the review stand right past my Fuehrer!”

I was speechless.

“Now,” she said proudly. “I am American. And now, America is the most powerful nation on earth!”

Gave me pause. We were facing an election that year. Kennedy’s assassination had put LBJ in the White House, and he was being challenged by Barry Goldwater. Some of Goldwater’s pronouncements also gave me pause. As I listened to one of his speeches on the radio one day, he talked about how in Vietnam we had to “Defoliate those jungles and kill every last Vietcong!” Agent Orange.

So the next day, I hung a large paper banner on the tiny patio railing in front of our apartment reading, “Defoliate Goldwater!”

In class later that day, I was taken to task by a Goldwater supporter, who demanded to know what the hell my banner was all about. I explained quite calmly to him that I opposed the war in Vietnam, and that some of the biologists I knew had good reason to believe that Agent Orange would prove toxic to innocent civilians and even to our own troops. He scoffed.

But although she frowned mightily, my landlady didn’t object to my proclamation, and it stayed up until November, when we voters sent Barry scurrying back to Arizona with his tail between his legs.

The only thing he ever said that made any sense to me was that, “You can’t legislate morality!” I told my classmate, his big fan, “Great! Why not apply that to marijuana, abortion and the bashing of homosexuals?”

As I read about new Holocaust research findings, and how widespread Nazism truly was, I’m not surprised. We have the seeds of it right here. I find that some of the female bloggers and commentators online regarding local political issues can be just as vicious as the men. Yet, I think we still cut them some slack, thinking, oh, she’s just having a Mid-Month Moment. Wrong!

©2010 Dennis Green

American Idiots!

by Dennis Green

Taxation. Probably no subject of citizenship in a democracy is more controversial. Our very first Revolution, after all, was stimulated in part by unfair taxes imposed by King George upon the colonies, the infamous Tea Tax. "Taxation without representation!" became the rallying cry of the original, memorable Tea Party. And at the heart of the Tea Party Movement of today -- behind all the rhetoric about fascism and socialism is the passionate conviction that American government is disconnected from its citizenry.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the fundamental unfairness of our taxes. Every day, we hand over billions in compliance to a tax code that is so complex only a tax attorney or revenue agent can begin to comprehend it, a tax code that is often regressive, that favors the rich, that provides multi-national corporations with off-shore tax shelters and other loopholes not available to the average citizen.

And how does this vaunted, "democratic" government spend our money? Well, it spends trillions on unnecessary and ill-conceived wars and other foreign entanglements, enriching Pentagon Groupies like Blackwater and Halliburton. It spends hundreds of billions bailing out banks and other financial institutions it allowed to get "Too big to fail." and it maintains an enormous cadre of overpaid civil servants and other flunkies who provide uncertain and unreliable "services" such as de-regulation, intelligence that fails to anticipate terrorist acts, and sweetheart deals for global petroleum corporations.

Corporate welfare is much more costly to we the people than the social kind, and yet President Ronald Reagan didn't make fun of "Welfare CEOs driving Mercedes to pick up their farm subsidies." And today, Conservatives attempt to channel our very righteous anger and resentment toward immigrants rather than BP or Goldman-Sachs.

Another massive population of fat cats living on the dole of our taxes are the public employee unions, including police, fire and teachers. Their retirement benefits far exceed in generosity anything enjoyed by the average citizen, and they also enjoy a lifetime job security and seniority system unknown in the private sector. Such protections as tenure for teachers shield them from job performance reviews, and forego having their salary and promotions tied to the quality of their product, as they are in the real world.

But there is a stirring of long overdue recognition in the heart of the American Idiot, the Taxpayer, that all those trillions he is forking over in income tax, excise tax, property tax, sales tax and parcel tax is the biggest scam and Ponzi Scheme ever perpetrated by a government upon it's people. And we American Idiots are PISSED!

We're beginning to just say "No!" to parcel tax initiatives, to new state tax referendums, to loopholes providing local government and schools with an easy and convenient way around limits on taxation, (such as California's Proposition 13, the Jarvis Initiative limiting property taxes), and runaway growth in government spending. We would rather see our cities declare bankruptcy, as Vallejo did, than continue their profligate ways.

California's credit rating is in the tank, regardless of the fact that it has some of the highest taxes in the nation. Those opposing cuts in spending always point to programs for disadvantaged children as the reason spending should continue at present rates, or even rise! "Give us your hard-earned money or we'll shoot this kid!" they cry. Local school districts do the same, holding "Quality education, excellence in learning" hostage to the next taxpayer bailout. As if good and dedicated teachers would slack off if they didn't get their annual salary increase!

Our demands:

1) A tax code we can all understand. One that can be contained in five simple, easy-to-read pages. No corporate loopholes. No special advantages for the rich. No caps on the amount of income they pay progressive taxes on, or amounts they pay into such programs as Social Security and Medicare. Under Eisenhower, the very rich paid 97% of their incomes in federal taxes!

2) Limit sales taxes, some of the most regressive and unfair taxes we pay, to no more than four percent of the purchase price. Eliminate excise and "luxury" taxes completely.

3) Keep limits on property taxes, and not only keep the two/thirds supermajority requirement for the passage of parcel taxes, but cap each new one at $150 per year per parcel, whether it is residential or commercial, and limit the number of such parcel taxes a property may be burdened with at any one time to two.

In other words, force government and public agencies to live within our means.

Tomorrow: a total alternative to paying taxes at all. Stay tuned.

©2010 Dennis Green

GaGa Over GaGa

by Dennis Green

Okay, it's not the costuming or the wild makeup. It's not the panties and bra, the nudity and near nudity, not the machine gun tits. It's the wild imagination, and the way she captures the underbelly of American culture so well. And even as you're saying, "Hell no! Not ME!" you prove my point.

Wretched excess. Decadence. Filthy rich. My McMansion is bigger than your McMansion! A nation corrupt to it's very core. So of course we prop up corrupt dictators and oppressive, undemocratic, unrepresentative governments across the globe.

And Lady GaGa is capturing it all, and more keenly every day, more brilliantly with each new music video.

Her latest, "Alejandro!" is a true work of art. Yes, she sings well, and her dancing is sublime. And the choreography is sharp on the marks and athletic, even military in its precision. But the GaGa is up to something far more ambitious than song & dance. She's after the Zeitgeist itself, that beast that changes faces every minute. As do we.

"How?" she asks, "How, exactly are we a nation at war?" Well, the answer is that the war creeps into anything and everything we do -- from love to betrayal to departure, but especially to our very identity. With a face constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and a body to match, Lady GaGa shows us, step by step, what we've become. Marching in lockstep, faces frozen in mindless patriotic fervor, robotic in our every move.

"Don't call my name/don't call my name/Alejandro!" In a video produced almost entirely in black & white, this work of art will change the genre forever. Not since the early music videos of Duran Duran, in the 80s, have the times been so vividly portrayed.

And Duran Duran was obviously up to something altogether different, although the wretched excess has a distinct family resemblance. From the elegant denials of "Come Undone" to the manic strutting of "Wild Boys," the energy is there, but more civilized and muted. A much later, 2007 video by Duran Duran, "Falling Down," portrays the consequences of all that lovely decadence, in a Lady Rehab Hell.

In “Falling Down,” a young, fashion-forward and strung out alcoholic woman is dropped off by her boyfriend at the big, forbidding rehab hospital, and staggers inside, held up by the arms by two stoic orderlies. And inside, all the grotesque antics and horrors of detox are shown -- the medications spat in the doctor's face, the cat fights, the accusations, the spitz baths, the depression, the despair. And as she leaves, after 60 days in residency, her boyfriend hands her a glass of Champaign, and she raises it in a toast to her physician as she gets in the limo and is driven away.

But in GaGa's world, in OUR world, there is no rehab, no regret. The American Dream is invulnerable, and complete. A little menacing at times, perhaps, but not enough so to awaken us. She keeps on keepin' on, no matter how racy or scattered or gropey it gets, in situations that would leave most of us exhausted. No matter how many hands reach out for her, no matter how many heads are turned her way.

The message is always the same: Lady GaGa is available!

And yet, of course, she's really not. She is in truth as remote from humankind as any human can get, and she likes it that way. That way, she's safe from all those groping hands and metallic, menacing faces. And she is always in control.

She has taken the Madonna Model to it's current limits, which are no longer the limits set by frowning moralists and censors who were horrified by “Like A Virgin,” but only the limits of her own imagination. The limits of stagecraft, after all, are very few these days. The magic of computer graphics and now 3-D are virtually endless, so it's not just what dance steps she can manage, and what quick cuts in the edit room, but a whole broad panoply of illusions that can be realized.

And GaGa uses them all. In videos produced in tandem with her latest album, "Fame Monster," the outrageous ideas and techniques evolve, from "Love Game" to "Beautiful, Rich & Dirty," to "Telephone," where, in prison, the Lady G wears the latest in 25th Century prison dress and submits willingly to abuse from fellow prisoners and guards alike.

This set of videos evolve, as all those have before it, until the stage is set for "Alejandro!" And suddenly you realize that it's not Madonna at all who provides the inspiration! No...it's Michael Jackson! GaGa is the white, the female, the often near-naked version of the King of Pop! No coincidence that his attempted comeback and premature death overlaps with Lady's ascent to the very top of the charts...

Her poses are not "Vogue" at all, so much as the kinds of trademark moves Jackson was rightly famous for. He had his Moonwalk. She has her orgiastic, gang bangin' group grope. He had his fedora and one glittery glove. She has her Nun's costume and the machine gun bra. He could be, as in "Bad!" truly villainous, as she is in nearly all her recent videos, truly lethal to any man who comes anywhere near her. She gives "Femme Fatale" a whole new meaning, and it is Absolute!

I've read closely now several interviews with the Lady, in Interview and in Rolling Stone, and they confirm it all, these reasons I'm so taken by Lady G and her genius. She says about the title track of her next album, “That chorus came to me, like, I swear, I didn’t even write it. I think God dropped it in my lap. And I swear to you that I’m in a place now writing music where there’s this urgency to protect and take care of my fans.” I know the feeling.

So…you can make fun of her, as you probably did Madonna and Prince and Michele Jackson, especially when he was living in Fantasy Land and making millions. But examine for a moment your own life.

Are you straight, or are you twisted? Are you content with your life, or are you even mildly dismayed? These are the sorts of questions you will be asked when you go into Rehab. Not your problem? Good for you.

Meanwhile, as we get through it one day at a time, artists like Lady GaGa are shining that bright light on what the culture values. If our society is broken, if people are greedy, rude and unkind, if we value riches over the life of the spirit, materialism and decadence is what we’ll see.

©2010 Dennis Green

Reconciliation

by Dennis Green

I have about a half dozen shirts made by “English Laundry,” made in Great Britain, and very well-tailored, very stylish. They feature decorated lapels and sleeve cuffs, all made of heavy pure cotton, and several of them are dedicated to the Independence of India from Great Britain, and have removable collars, leaving a kind of Gandhi clerical look.

On the back is the date: “1947 India” and I am reminded of that event, having studied it in my second grade class, reading about it in “Current Events,” a little weekly newsletter circulated in my school. The culmination of Gandhi’s campaign of “Civil Disobedience” and “Peaceful Non-Violent Protests,” for a free and independent India the whole world had high expectations.

But almost immediately, the large Muslim population and majority Hindus were at each other’s throats. Soon, Pakistan had broken away from India, in two large east and west blocks, startling cartographers everywhere, I am sure. And many territories disputed then remain so today.

Gandhi’s plans for reconciliation between the Hindu majority, most of whom opposed and worked against British colonial occupation, and the Pakistanis, Muslim and many of whom had tended to support British rule, were thwarted of course by his assassination. And any attempts at reconciliation since have been short-lived.

We forget that after our own Revolution, we as a people underwent a very difficult reconciliation between British sympathizers and Revolutionary Colonialists. In some instances, the property of Loyalists was seized, in some instances they were driven from their positions in commerce or government. The bitterness between the two populations lingered on for many years, and inspired many infamous side effects, including disputes over just how “Federalist” the new nation should be.

In more recent times, the most successful reconciliation on record is that achieved by Nelson Mandela in the newly liberated nation of South Africa following their defeat of apartheid. Considering the horrors of the rebellion and civil war there — the “necklacing of captives with burning tires — such a reconciliation was a major feat indeed.

In more recent times, U.S. interference in the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan have left divisions within those tribal countries even worse than those existing there before. At least Saddam Hussein kept a sort of thuggish peace between minority and majority sects, and the Taliban, no matter how ruthless, kept an uneasy peace in Afghanistan. Since our invasions, their differences have become irreconcilable.

Obviously, reconciliation is a tricky and a demanding business. We see from the success of the World Cup Games in Johannesburg just how united the people of South Africa are today, and what an impressive achievement Mandela’s truly is.

On the home front, I’m witnessing in microcosm just how difficult such a turn of affairs can be. Proponents of SunCal’s development of Alameda Point, who lost 85%/15% in March, and proponents of the school parcel tax initiative, defeated last month, not only persist in attempting to achieve their original goals, but bitterly criticize the victors. I have never seen this community so divided.

Now a feud between the Interim City Manager, Anne Marie Gallant, and City Councilwoman Lena Tam, threatens to worsen the divide. The local newspapers, enriched by consistent advertising placements by SunCal, have chosen to side with Tam and SunCal. Outspoken critics of SunCal put their faith in Gallant.

Because I played a major role in the defeat of both Measure B, (SunCal), and Measure E, (schools), I want to take an influential role in reconciliation. Alamedans for Fair Taxation, (AFT), the group that opposed the last school parcel tax, is busy designing a new parcel tax proposal for the schools that opponents of Measure E can support.

Such a new proposal may bring in enough revenue to cancel the $7 million deficit faced currently by the schools, but I would prefer to see more cuts in spending first. It will also have to be BULLET PROOF, that is, so fair that no one can disagree with its premise, that it will spread the new tax burden fairly and equitably. None of these regressive, split-roll, seniors exempted tricks!

We shall see if reconciliation is possible, and whether those who claim they want to “Save the Schools” are willing to pay their fair share of the costs for doing so.

©21010 Dennis Green

No Cry Babies!

by Dennis Green

You may have noticed a new signature on my emails: “NO CRY BABIES!” And where did I come up with this, and why? Well, I’m sitting here in my Captain Nemo Chair, and on one of the several tables around my Command Station sits a small pack of wooden matches, a memento from one of our favorite hangs, Fog City Diner in S.F.

They’ve been there forever, and I’ve been going there since 1979, this café designed to look like a diner of old, resembling in fact an Airstream Trailer I lived in for a year while finishing up my undergraduate years at UCSB. Compact living. And one of our Chums, Lodewijk Borst, waits tables there and heads up the rock band Skirt Lifter.

Lodewijk recently married a lovely Brazilian lass, and their newborn daughter is a dream! They recently spent some time in Brazil with Mrs. Borst’s family, and Lodewijk’s emails gave me a sense of the land where the next Olympics will be held. But I digress…

The Fog City Diner motto is “No Cry Babies,” and it hangs on a sign outside the door, on another near the restrooms, and is sported on those match box covers. I’ve always liked its intent — if your baby starts bawling, please take the little darling outside — but also its wider implications.

I heard George Steinbrenner’s quote the other day, “Sure I’m a sore loser. Show me someone who loses and is happy about it and I’ll show you a loser!” And I get his drift about the winning Yankee ways, but it immediately reminded me of how sorely dumfounded are the losers of the recent Measure E school parcel tax initiative. They’re still crying.

One letter writer, who doesn’t live on the island, even threatens NOT to move here if we don’t pass the next school parcel tax. And I say, “Oh, please! Don’t throw us in that briar patch of your disaffections, Lady!” Our loss, no doubt.

And Trustee Mike McMahon, on one blog discussion thread, laces into me for perceiving him as a “schoolyard bully.” Then quotes my op-ed piece, where I describe him as “deliberate,” and says that doesn’t really sound like a bully now, does it? You can see that subtlety is not Mike’s art form.

But we’re also seeing letters from people who voted in favor of Measure E and will not again. Why? Because all during the campaign, we were told that if it failed, at least one high school, one middle school and four elementary schools would be closed immediately, not to reopen in the Fall. And now…well…maybe some of those will close in 2011, if the next parcel tax doesn’t pass. This dishonesty is apparent even to some of the partisans formerly blinded by the threat, “Give us the money or we’ll shoot this kid!”

Measure E was so unfair it seemed to reflect precisely the sort of corruption and mismanagement apparent at AUSD. And now one of our City Council members, Lena Tam, is being investigated for felonious conduct in leaking privileged memos and emails to the developer SunCal that persists in trying to develop Alameda Point in spite of being defeated, 85%/15% at the polls in February.

Tam is crying foul, and SunCal threatens to bankrupt Alameda with lawsuits if it doesn’t yet get its way. Tam will no doubt be their star witness. And how will the cry babies react? How will the newspapers and blogs that support SunCal cover this story? Will they side with Tam and SunCal against the City, the taxpayers and their own readers? Are they really THAT DUMB? Are they really such cry babies? Stay tuned.

©2010 Dennis Green

Online Learning Redux

by Dennis Green

Well, the University of California is considering building an online program leading to the Bachelor’s Degree, and the proposal is generating the same sort of resistance from University Professors that it does from public school K-12 teachers and advocates. UC would be the first top-tier research institution to offer a bachelor’s degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus programs.

And the number of college students taking online courses nearly tripled between 2002 and 2008. Nearly 5 million students took at least one online course in 2008, up from 1.6 million in 2002.

Among the most successful universities to offer such programs is the University of Massachusetts, (“Umass-Online”), which includes graduate degrees, and took in $56 million last year, from 45,815 students. Cal State University East Bay, (formerly Cal State Hayward, where I taught Advertising for three years), also offers four online bachelor degrees, in businesses administration, human development, tourism and recreation.

But at UC, the proposal has some faculty knickers in a twist. Two of those twisted profs, Timothy Hampton and Garrison Sposito, write, in an op-ed piece to the San Francisco Chronicle, “UC must put emphasis on education, not brand,” the following claims, which are typical of the critics of online education:

“1) Online teaching cannot replace the classroom experience.” They talk about the “face-to-face dialogue” and how only the classroom “conversation” can be flexible enough to meet changing student needs. This from a University, Berkeley, where 47% of the undergraduate teaching is done by graduate students, and most of the rest in huge lecture halls where students are glued to their laptops while the prof drones on…

“2) UC serves California.” That is, such online offerings would attract some of those (gasp!) students in Kansas or Maine or even Texas! Note: the summer I taught P.R. at UC Berkeley Extension, most of my students were foreign exchange students, who paid enormous out-of-state fees, many that year from the former “East Germany” and Poland, to the great profit of the UC System, not me. So much for the Golden Bear!

“3) Teaching and research are one.” That is, putting “bits of teaching” online would sever the connection between teaching and research. Proponents of the new program counter that the real challenge is finding ways to present laboratory classes online that would in fact not only preserve, but strengthen that connection. Can it be?

One of my best friends, Dick Reichelderfer, with his PhD in Organimatallic Chemistry, found his true calling designing ways to carve silicon computer chips using plasma technology, and to demonstrate those techniques to his fellow scientists and researchers online. Dick told me that such presentations were more vivid and clear than any process demonstrated in a large lab to large groups of people.

So, if anything, I’m skeptical of the old “factory model” of classroom education, where one expert stands up in front of 30 (or 300) novices and imparts knowledge. I suspect that only a very few of those classroom teachers can even depart from the lecture format to stimulate a vigorous, free-for-all discussion, let alone the kind of one-on-one tutorial made possible online.

Online tutorials alone constitute a $3 billion industry, with more new and innovative companies coming online every year. If the University of California gets into the act, the whole field will explode. And some of the faculty members are dismayed…and rightly so. They see the same implications for the future that I saw crashing those big lectures at UC Berkeley with my girlfriend Chris in 1961, who was actually enrolled there, and years later in those classrooms at Wheeler Hall where I was teaching Extension.

Teachers are dispensable. Disposable. Replaceable. Not by a machine, but by a better teacher, whose presence can be shared effectively with a much wider and larger audience, that presence and exchange enhanced by online video, special effects, music, instant demonstrations from halfway ‘round the world, and even, yes, social networking.

Irresistible. Compelling. The future always is. And the future of education is here, in the digital world of CyberSpace. Rather than putting the emphasis on Employment, let’s put it where it belongs, on Education, no matter where we find it.

©2010 Dennis Green

Mama Grizzlies

by Dennis Green

There’s a lot of talk about the new Sarah Palin video about the “Mama Grizzlies” rising up protecting their cubs. Assuming Sarah has had a lot of intimate experience in the wilds of Alaska with that breed of bear, let’s see how well the metaphor holds up.

Mama Grizzlies, first of all, spend a lot of time hibernating, fast asleep in their dens, living after their stored body fat, which, presumably Sarah hasn’t had time to do since resigning the office of Governor. Next up, their behavior is highly unpredictable, especially when they have cubs to protect, because they often abandon those cubs, especially when food is in short supply…as in a recession, say.

Mama Grizzlies, just like many of those elderly women supporting Sarah, are very hairy, beyond help from Nair or other depilatories, and sometimes they are, you should pardon the expression, STINKY! Especially when they’ve been scratching their butts against the nearest tree all day.

This is the problem with metaphors. You can’t control them. I suppose Sarah was after only that one image, a grown, female Grizzly Bear up on its hind legs, ferocious in its defense of those it loves. But why stop there? Suppose that Mama Grizzly gets a thorn stuck in its paw…? Will Sarah crawl bravely into its den and pull that nasty thorn out? Or will she hold out for a speaking fee?

Finally, when it comes to how those Grizzlies got that way — Mamas — by their mating habits, let’s just hope all those gray-haired women in the Sarah crowds aren’t stuck with that one. They would have to take on several mates in any one season, selecting the most fit according to the rules of the tundra: The most obese, those best qualified at putting on some extra adipose tissue just to get through those long, cold winters. At least they don’t always have to be on top!

Palin has been accused of being vapid in the making of that video. And liberals regard her, and her comments and personality, as the gift that keeps on giving. They would like nothing better than to see her as the GOP candidate for President in 2012. There’s already am image on YouTube, a shot of her face painted in on a nude woman sprawled on a Grizzly bearskin rug in a teasing pose, offering to remove the eyeglasses next. Zowie, Baby!

Now that Sarah is more Hollywood than Anchorage, though, it makes a lot of sense for her to co-opt our California symbol — the Golden Bear — from our state flag, and apply it to her own national ambitions. We can only hope the reconciliation between her daughter and the father of her grandchild goes as well. It’s about time we had a First Family in the White House as dysfunctional as the average American family is. Not since the Reagans have our chances looked so good!

Rumor on the streets of Berkeley is that the Bear Backers, founded by affluent conservative Cal grads, is one organization ready to throw its support behind Sarah and her behind. And as for talk about the “Golden State and Golden Girls,” Alaska’s Gold Rush is much more recent than ours.

Already, Obama’s daughters are embracing more cuddly metaphors, residing as they do in one of the most functional families in the nation: the Sun Bear, the Koala, Pandas and the legendary Teddy Bear, not nearly as Republican as its namesake. We’ll see whether lovable and cuddly beats ferocious and stinky come November.

©2010 Dennis Green

A Calling

by Dennis Green

In our completely dysfunctional, materialistic society, you don’t hear that quaint expression much anymore. A calling is a passionate desire to do something, to follow the call of your spirit. It used to apply to the ministry, and perhaps still does. It also was once applied to teaching, but no more.

Those who are great at teaching feel it as a calling. They love the students, love being in the classroom, love seeing those eager young faces light up as an idea, or a process, or even a rule of grammar gets through to them and they can say, “Ah-HA!” If you love teaching, you will have that experience almost every day that you teach. And there are no excuses!

“Difficult circumstances,” students who are from poor families, who are learning English, who never saw an alarm clock before, never had to exercise the kind of self-discipline it takes to do your homework, study or compose a report all night long, prepare for a tough exam..? Good teachers will get past all that.

I’ve known all sorts of people who have felt an irrestible calling in their lives. Nurses, doctors, artists, writers, scientists, a rodeo cowboy, a Hell’s Angel, an architect, even a lawyer or two. Two ministers, a cabbie, one cop, a mechanic, a man who owned a bookstore, and lots and lots of teachers.

For myself, I taught college-level English, Composition and Advertising classes over the course of 14 years. At UC Santa Barbara, under Affirmative Action, I had kids in my classes with all those cited disadvantages, and yet I taught them, and they learned, and some of them excelled. I even had students who were part of the Lompoc Prison “Prisoner-Release Program,” including one who wrote a story about “shanking” a fellow inmate. I had to fail him.

“But Mr. Green!” he complained. “I came to all your classes!”

“Yes, Rodney, but you didn’t do all the work. You handed in only four of the ten assignments.” Get it? Got it? Good!

At Hayward State, teaching Advertising, I faced a similarly diverse student body — many kids from affluent middle-class homes, many from backgrounds of poverty, many the first in their families to go to college at all. Classes of 40-50 students, and I resolved that by breaking them down into “agencies” of five students each.

In the 90-minute classes, I would lecture for half an hour, conduct a lively discussion for twenty minutes, and then have them meet in their smaller groups and solve some dilemma I posed for the final forty minutes. “Pick a product or service, then design a campaign around it, and for your final exam, give the class the presentation you would give the client. Make it good.”

Then I would make the rounds, sit in with each group for a few minutes, and get a sense of which students weren’t getting it and were falling behind. Those students got special one-on-one tutorials during my office hours, until they caught up.

I had my Hayward students enthralled only two evenings a week, so I can imagine having them, in high school, say, for five days straight. I would love it! And while I was making only $700/month at Hayward, I never in all my years taught for the money. Many years at UCSB, I barely knew what I was making, and often teaching full-time, three sections of 30 students each, earning $800/month.

If it’s truly a calling, it’s not about the money. In fact, paying lower salaries tends to filter out the greedy, but not those who feel the calling. A passion for teaching beats a passion for bucks any day. “Why teach if you can make more money going into high tech, or nursing, or finance?” one pal asked me recently. Indeed, that’s just the point. Because you must.

©2010 Dennis Green

American Idiots

by Dennis Green

Many Americans, perhaps even a majority, are convinced that our government, at all levels, is dysfunctional and corrupt. We no longer believe that our elected leaders truly represent us, we the people, or our best interests. Without a clear and solid sense of that representation, we vigorously resent the out-of-control taxation we are subjected to. “Taxation without representation!” we cry.

On the face of it, it seems obvious that our U.S. government is rife with corruption — corporate lobbyists calling the shots, funding election campaigns and receiving in return all the perks they want. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and BP’s record in this regard, simply drive home that point.

The $900 BILLION bailout for the banks and financial firms was simply the biggest tip-off. It reminded us all of the Chrysler bailout, the salvation of the Savings & Loan industry, and shortly after the Bush Bailout of “Too Big To Fail,” Obama continued the practice with Chevrolet, and then a Stimulus Package that favored public employee job creation over the private sector.

In an edition of the SF Chronicle, 6/4, there is a terrible revelation about how a posse of San Francisco City electricians bilked the taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in truth, public employee service unions are doing that all the time. Bloated salaries and retirement benefits, bloated payrolls…a never-ending litany of WASTE in local, state and federal government is disgusting.

The assumptions behind our “tax and spend” system of government is corrupt and totally mistaken. The public good becomes the public trough where all the little piggies line up to take advantage of systems of government which have very little oversight, NO transparency or accountable management. In Alameda alone, millions of dollars in unfunded public employee retirement costs may just drive this little island city into bankruptcy and takeover by the state.

Spending money we don’t have…in our personal lives, we know full well the consequences of such profligate behavior. But in government, such practices are common — deferred maintenance, bloated and unjustified salaries, unfunded pension obligations — and it’s always we the people who get stuck with the bill. In Alameda, the failed attempt of “Alameda Power & Telecom” to compete with Comcast has created a $90 million dollar loss that will have to be made up by the ratepayers, and the taxpayers, somehow.

But we are sick and tired of behaving like “American Idiots,” just going along with every wasteful expenditure that these goofballs can come up with. “Gee, another rate increase, another parcel tax! Must be for a good reason!” Bullpucky!

And so, a taxpayer revolt is brewing that will make California’s Jarvis & Gann, and Prop. 13, severely limiting property taxes, look like a giveaway. We have had enough of this nonsense, of financing the piss-poor management of the schools, the power companies, redevelopment and city funding of impotent and unproductive business associations claiming to retain existing and attract new businesses, at a huge cost to taxpayers with no discernable return.

What a concept! Return on investment! Universal in the private sector and unheard of in the public environments. In Alameda, Leslie Little, Director of Development, awards subsidies to organizations such as PSBA, WABA, GABA and the Chamber of Commerce in the many hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, without any proven return on investment.

And now City Council member Lena Tam is under investigation for leaking privileged memos to developer SunCal and to the Fire Fighters union, undermining the City’s position in negotiating with both bodies. Over 400 pages of evidence have prompted calls for her resignation.

Such indiscretions are common in local government and of a far greater magnitude on the state and federal levels. And such universal mismanagement is never held accountable.

We do not have to perpetuate this American Idiocy! The first American Revolution was prompted by the resistance to taxes on tea by King George, and the Tea Party Rebellion. The current protest movement that takes its name from that movement doesn’t have a clear focus yet, but if it ever figures out what this resistance is really all about, LOOK OUT!

©2010 Dennis Green

The Other Side of Measure E

Many proponents of Measure E, the school parcel tax initiative defeated in the recent Alameda election, are, unfortunately, turning out to be sore losers. Churlish in their accusations against those of us who legitimately disagreed with the Measure and worked and voted against it, they have to ridicule us.

We’re being called “greedy, short-sighted, fearful and uninformed” by those whose feelings are hurt because they put everything they had behind a poorly designed and illogical political initiative and strategy. Here’s what we perceived, and what they missed:

Measure E as designed was the most unfair kind of taxation device possible, regressive for home owners, as it would have taxed all homes the same, regardless of size or value. And a split-roll tax, which will probably be found illegal on appeal, is also patently and obviously unfair to business owners on its face, with a cap protecting larger corporations and still dunning many business owners as much as $10,000 a year for eight long years.

A simple flat tax, X cents per square foot, without any cap, would give small condo owners a fair shake, and put more of the business burden on those commercial owners who can most afford it. Proponents never got this, or were simply in denial about its unfairness under long-standing American taxation tradition.

AUSD made two major claims that just did NOT hold water: 1) That Alameda schools are excellent, that that excellence was delivered by past parcel taxes, and that Measure E would guarantee the continuation of such excellence. 2) That it had made all the cuts it possibly could without such dire sacrifices as closing “neighborhood schools,” (and without naming which ones, thereby threatening all families with children in school.)

More honestly, long ago, teachers and staff could have offered to take a temporary ten percent cut in salaries, thereby saving the district the $7 million dollar deficit it will face.

In both instances, AUSD winds up making the teachers look bad. Those of us who bothered to do any serious research discovered that in many proficiency scores, Alameda schools are mediocre, not excellent at all, and Measure E brought this scrutiny to bear on schools and their teachers. Moreover, the bitterness of the campaign, and now even its aftermath, almost guarantees that many of us will not lend much strong support to the schools again anytime soon.

The claim that a “tyrannical minority” defeated the will of the people is nonsense. With a low, 50% turnout of registered voters, a tiny minority of 36% of all registered voters could have passed this Measure and imposed its terms on the majority.

One Measure E supporter goes so far as to generously and publicly call off the threatened boycott of businesses that opposed Measure E. What she doesn’t know is that very quietly, and behind the scenes, many of us who opposed Measure E have been tamping down a threatened boycott of businesses that SUPPORTED it, including both Alameda newspapers.

So, as Sainted mother used to say, there are always two sides to every issue. I know that many Measure E supporters couldn’t fathom this to be true, that some of us saw serious flaws in the Measure, and were logical enough to oppose it.

And that it definitely took more courage to display a “No on E” sign and vote against it than to say Yes.

©2010 Dennis Green