EdgeCity

Killer's Regret

2010-10-24T06:38:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

I watch a dramatization of a story I feel as if I have heard before. An old man’s voice recounts the events of several days during the Battle of the Bulge. As an American soldier, this man shot and killed a young German soldier, not well but badly, and the other man took two days to die. There in the snow, under bombardment, the old man says, they were stranded only a few feet apart in separate cavities in the ground.

“I saw him when I shot him, a young man, fair, with blonde hair and calm blue eyes. I could hear him lying there dying. All night long. The next day, he was still muttering and coughing, and then, finally, he fell silent. I haven’t been able to forget him. All my life, ever since then, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of him. I can’t get him out of my mind…”

The man who speaks these words, we are told, died at the age of 90 a few years ago, a short time after this recording was made. The visuals are uncertain, showing snow, and a snow bank, and a dark night sky. But we believe him.

And I wonder to myself, Did that German soldier who shot and killed my cousin Stanley in that same protracted battle survive the night? The war? Did he have such nightmares? Could he never get the image of Cousin Stanley out of his head? Did Stanley’s killer feel any regret?

For that’s what they are, all of them. Killers. Many of them are decorated with ribbons and precious metal. But they are still killers. They defy the Sixth Commandment, contorting logic and reason to justify what they do. Warriors like me know exactly what they do. They kill. They damn themselves to eternal fires, just from that one moment. Fire first.

I know that our species is conflicted. We hail the Ten Commandments until they get in the way of our natural instincts, to fuck, to cheat, to kill, to steal, to covet our neighbor’s ass, especially if she’s gorgeous. We are every bit as hypocritical as Muslims who kill Muslims in defiance of the Qu’ran.

The Commandment in the Old Testament is either serious, or it’s not. There is nothing in the Bible to justify the excuses and the ducking of its meaning…”Well, we didn’t really mean warfare or capital punishment or cops shooting a suspect who reaches for his waistband…” The shooting, in the back, of an unarmed man on a BART platform on New Year’s Eve last year has prompted outcries of injustice only from the Black Community of Oakland. How many white ministers joined those protests? Is religion color-blind, or not?

And now, the latest Pentagon documents released by Wikileaks details the 150,000 civilian deaths in Iraq caused by the U.S. invasion, occupation and war. Only a fraction of those are attributed to our enemy. And in those same documents, the callous and deliberate torture of prisoners is also described in cold-hearted, chilling detail.

The U.S. and its leaders are obviously guilty of war crimes, and if we ever lose our military power to wage war, some of the guilty may one day be brought to justice. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has given us, yet again, a reputation as bullies and killers all around the world.

So when I heard that old soldier’s lifelong regret for, as a young man, shooting and killing another young man, who lay moaning and dying, weeping and calling out to his mother, and how those sounds and images stayed with him the rest of his life, I can’t help but wonder how many thousands of our own boys come home with similar nightmarish memories. And on this Sunday morning, I pray for their eternal souls.

Neanderthals

2010-10-22T08:59:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

Matt Taibi, one of the finest political analysts at work in America today, has a new article in Rolling Stone about the Tea Party which is hilarious and insightful: “The Truth About the Tea Party.” Early on, he sums up his findings after spending many weeks among them: “They are full of shit.” I love the candidness of Journalism 2.0.

Taibi focuses on Rand Paul, M.D., the son of Libertarian Party candidate for President in 2008, Ron Paul, a very sincere, if whacko, Texas politico. Rand was rigorously opposed to big government and all government spending until a bill came up to limit funding to physicians by Medicare. Suddenly, this M.D. turned politician was all in favor of government spending. And that was just his first change of mind.

Tea Party candidates who have made it past the primaries are demonstrating their stunning lack of knowledge about even the things they swear are dear to them. Delaware U.S. Senate candidate Christine “I Am NOT A Witch” O’Donnell recently asked, “You mean the separation of church and state is really in the Constitution?” Duh. When asked, after saying she opposed Supreme Court activist decisions, which decisions she opposed, she couldn’t think of any. Three days later, she pleaded, “Well, I’m in complete agreement with this Court, because it’s so conservative.” Right, Christine.

Other Neanderthals endorsed by the Tea Party believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old, in keeping with Creationist theory. If America is behind the advanced world in science and math, these folks are not going to help us catch up!

The Colorado Neanderthal has claimed that “Being gay is a choice,” (as if there’s anything wrong with being gay…), and that people who choose to be gay will recruit others they come into contact with, (the “Gay Agenda”), and that therefore they should not be allowed to marry, adopt, teach or even run for office, as they might turn the entire Congress gay. (As if they’re not pretty happy already!)

In the many Tea Party rallies Taibi attended, he saw no black people at all, and almost no one under 50. Most of the people attending these rallies, in fact, were past retirement age, and when he asked them, most admitted they were collecting Social Security and on Medicare. Yet they railed against government spending and government programs of any kind.

A surprising number, Taibi writes, were in those little motorized wheelchairs, and all of them admitted they got Medicare to pay for them by gaming the system.

Personally, I was intrigued for awhile by the Libertarian philosophy, especially Ron Paul’s. He is opposed to war, to the criminalization of drugs, to any government interference in our lives. Including sexual orientations, and any ban on gay marriage. He still is. But I soon discovered just how contrary and contradictory his son and the other Tea Party Neanderthals really are.

Once he won the nomination of the Republican Party, Taibi writes, Rand soon abandoned most of his Libertarian views and positions, just as he did his opposition to government spending except when it comes to cashing those Medicare checks. I only hope the college graduates of America feel the same way I do, and get to the polls this year in larger numbers than ever.

America is at a crossroads. We can descend into the conservative abyss Great Britain did in the 1980s when its empire finally collapsed, or we can renew ourselves as other great powers exhausted by warfare have finally done. China’s renewal can be an inspiration, not just a threat. But if we let the Neanderthals take over, we will never know greatness again.

Meg's Illegal Nanny

2010-09-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

It's a paradigm familiar to anyone who lives in California -- the wealthy matron who hires an illegal alien from Mexico to rear her children. Much more common than the tomato farm field hand toiling in the hot sun just outside Bakersfield, all over Southern California, tucked away in little make-shift apartments over the garage are these live-in nannies available 24/7 who work for little more than room and board, exploited by their employers.

When I was married to the Blonde Bombshell from Orange County, I had a sister and brother-in-law who lived on Balboa Island in Newport Beach, two blocks from John Wayne, who fit the stereotype completely. They had two little girls, belonged to the John Birch Society, and paid a live-in Mexican nanny a pittance to live in that one-room apartment over their garage and be constantly on-duty.

"Green Card? I don't need no stinking Green Card!" And they never bothered to verify, or even do the most cursory background check to be sure they were not breaking the law. In her first debate with Jerry Brown this week, Meg Whitman said, in response to the subject of illegal immigration, "All employers have a strict responsibility to verify the Green Card status of people they hire to work for them."

A good, sensible, conservative answer, right?

But now Meg's nanny of 9 years is suing Whitman for lost wages, and the story of her firing is perhaps typical of Compassionate Conservatism. "She called me in and told me I was fired, and that 'From this moment on, I don't know you and you don't know me!'" No sverance pay, or even back wages. Unfortunately, Meg had not, in the words of Ronald Reagan, done due diligence to "Trust and verify!"

How embarasking, as Olive Oil might say. More importantly, Supreme Court nominees have been disqualified for less.

Whitman's first excuse? "I didn't know. She used her sister's immigration papers. How could I know?"

Her second excuse? "Well, her attorney is Gloria Allred, a notorious lawyer for pushing women's rights and defending immigration scofflaws. She's also supported Jerry Brown, contributed money to his campaign, and is hardly objective." Look who's talking.

But in my opinion, Meg is a goner. Her high-priced political consultants must know that. SHE must know that. For she has suddenly been identified to the voters as "One of THEM!" the ugly, dreaded Super Rich who are above the law, who needn't abide by the rules of polite society that the rest of us respect. All along, we've had our suspicions, and now they are confirmed.

We might vote for a sassy, successful female, even a centrist conservative like Meg. Until she takes on that awful shroud -- Privilege! Once she identifies with the very rich, the very privileged, we all know how the rich get richer. They cheat on their taxes. President Bush cuts their taxes way below the rates they paid under Reagan. On Wall Street, they cheat on their investments, and when they get in trouble, Bush bails them out.

And they hire illegal aliens at wages far below,, minimum -- the Growers to pick their crops, the people who live in McMansions the gardeners to trim their McLawns, the big contractors hiring men off street corners to repair their leaking roofs, and the Fifth Avenue matrons hiring the housekeepers and nannies to clean their homes and tend to their McKids. It isn't that we envy them the ability to skirt the law, to get all this cheap labor. No, we resent the fact that they turn right around and bemoan, as Meg has, the porous U.S. Southern border.

If you hire them, they will come. Most of us can't afford to have a live-in nanny, or an obedient housekeeper, a gardener, or a field hand. We may even have sympathized with Cesar Chavez and Huelga! And even if we didn't, we recognize rank hypocrisy when we see it, and the terrible unfairness of people who take advantage of the system, and then tell the rest of us to complain, and to look down upon those "Lawbreakers." Those other lawbreakers.

No, I never liked Meg Whitman, caught the sickly stench of her hypocrisy from afar. But now I have a good reason to get out that Voodoo Doll.

Remediation Is Not Education

2010-09-27T14:41:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that California spends about $135 million annually to teach college students what they should have learned in high school. Among the many other courses I taught at UC Santa Barbara and Westmont College — including Shakespeare and Bible Lit — I also taught remedial English composition classes for many years, so I saw the problem up close.

UC campuses enroll the top 12.5% of California high school graduates, and yet 65% of those incoming freshmen flunk the English Composition entrance exam. Many of them receive “A’s” and “B’s” in high school English, but are semi-literate at best.

The National Assessment Governing Board administers a test of core subjects, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, (NAEP), which found recently that in English and math, 4^th and 8^th graders in California rank near the bottom among all states. That is unacceptable.

Even more discouraging, a 2005 survey by Achieve, Inc. found employers estimated nearly 40 percent of recent California high school graduates were not prepared for entry-level jobs. Even in the workplace, they need remediation, further training in the basics.

In public schools, on average, only 65% of those entering high school ever graduate. In 2006, just one quarter of the 520,000 California students who had begun high school four years earlier completed the courses necessary to enroll in a four-year public university. Obviously, our schools are failing us.

While we are constantly reminded of the benefits of great schools, we are rarely or never told the social and criminal costs of those drop-outs. If public schools can take all the credit for those benefits, they should also take the blame for the costs of failure.

And no, I’m not going to blame the teachers, or their unions, for this malaise. In Sacramento, education funding has been hijacked by redevelopment agencies and budget-balancing tricks foisted off on we the people by our elected representatives. Their pet projects do not, in many instances, include the schools. Much of the effort by PTA’s and teachers’ groups now directed at raising new and much larger parcel taxes should instead be directed at Sacramento.

By the same token, if the students are failing too often, and in too many schools, let’s take the administrators by the throats and give them a good shaking. Never vote to re-elect a school board Trustee, for example, whose district is mediocre in its proficiency scores, or who has so poorly managed the district budget that it faces multi-million dollar deficits. They have been spending money they knew they didn’t have, and future monies they knew they wouldn’t have in years to come.

Shake up the School Superintendent and all his or her minions — by tying their salaries to the success and well-being, fiscally and otherwise, of the district and the individual schools they manage. Start with a ten percent cut. Their rate of failure in managing finances, physical plant and personnel would not be tolerated in the private sector. No Superintendent should be earning in a district as mediocre as Alameda, for example, nearly $200,000 per year, as Kirsten Vital does.

Finally, since Alameda teachers average $87,000 in salary and benefits per year, give them something more to do to earn their keep. Lengthen the school day past 3:00 p.m. Shorten that long summer vacation, and cut Xmas and Easter breaks in half. WITHOUT increasing that $87K.

We can’t fix our schools without major reform in the way teachers and their students interact. More use must be made of technology, and the way youngsters eagerly learn computer games. Finally, discipline must be maintained, and students must be kept busy working, learning new skills every day. Curriculum must be strengthened, even in job training programs leading to entry-level jobs upon graduation.

Until such reforms begin — from Sacramento to the teachers’ lounge — don’t give them another dime.

Credo

2010-09-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

I believe. And like all believers, I am a sum total of all that I have met, all the things I have believed in over the decades, including beliefs I held as a child and thought I had abandoned many years ago. That’s the richness of my personal mysticism after three score and ten.

There are times in all our lives when we feel it is important that we reject or deny something we once held to be true, in order to make room for something new, or simply to grow beyond where we were. But by that time, we have usually incorporated those old, previous beliefs into our very bones. That’s how it is with me.

I was raised Roman (French) Catholic, grew up in the midst of all that glory, the arched ceilings, the stained glass windows, the mourning, grieving, suffering alabaster statuary…the Mass in Latin, the rituals of standing, sitting, kneeling, genuflecting…the incense and the candles…the miters and the ceremonial processions…a worldly depiction of Heaven on Earth.

So there’s still a part of me that resonates to ritual, to ceremony and glorification. And I would not be true to myself if I denied that resonance, that connection to my own past. Taking it into account makes me a larger personality and persona than I was, say, as a sophomoric agnostic in the dorms.

And the agnostic is still there too, the denier. A very rational part of me knows that religion is corrupted by all sorts of worldly influences, that politics in church are as vicious as politics in academia, or anywhere. And so, I don’t go to church anymore, but that doesn’t mean my life is spiritually bereft.

And like Thoreau, I feel no obligation to be consistent, even with myself. Some days I scorn the concept of a personal God, at other times, I implore Him. Why should I narrow myself according to someone else’s theology or doctrine? Sometimes, I think Saul of Tarsus is still a Pharisee, and other days he strikes me as a Saint. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then…”

Some days I believe we were created in the image of God, and others that we created God in our image.

So it’s safe to say that I believe many things. Like Dylan, I believe in every breath I take. And like Dylan, I believe in Jesus and in Yahweh, in darkness and in the Light. But I don’t believe everything, or nothing. I am not a nihilist, or an atheist or a hard-headed pragmatist. No, I’m still rather dreamy-eyed, and optimistic in spite of myself.

I believe in natural selection, and that mutations happen all the time, that most of us contain at least an element or two of a mutated humanity, traits that will serve us very well someday. A very large comfort zone with computers, the internet and electronic gear may be a mutation serving us already, making some of us more successful, and more connected, than others are.

Some days I believe that “Faith” is just another word for “Ignorance” and other days I believe in the future of art, without any evidence or proof, along with the existence of my Muse.

Our DNA, after all, changes. Every one of us is a combination of the DNA from our father and the DNA from our mother. So besides those mutations and variants within an individual, each generation contains new combinations and variants. Even as an embryo, I was a platform for diversity.

I see no need to narrow my vision. Yes, I can be cynical about religion, and yes, I can still believe in the Holy Spirit. My whole life has been an encyclopedia of learning and belief. I believe in Evolution, and Plane Geometry, in politics and love. I don’t believe in politicians or ex-wives, however, or city council members scorned.

Credo. I believe. Do you?

A Young Man's Game

2010-09-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Perspective

A Young Man’s Game

by Dennis Green

There are many advantages to being an Elder of the Tribe, not the least of which is being exempt from “The Game.” The Game is also known as The Rat Race, and while I played rodentia racecara very well, I’m glad to be out of it, sitting not so much on the sidelines as in a reserved box seat, watching the action impassively.

Vying for the attention of the sweet young ladies is part of The Game, and that is much better played by young men, especially the feckless, those who are not attached to outcomes. For regardless of the outcome, even the young man knows that when he wakes up in the morning, he’ll still be all alone, and will love it that way!

But it isn’t love nor money I’m so thankful to be free of now. It’s politics. I still dabble from the sidelines in this game, which is not, as has been noted, Softball, but I don’t take any of it very seriously anymore. I know that regardless of who wins, just another rascal will be taking office in January.

For all of us, the entire species, is made up of Little Rascals — some in finance, some in education, some in marketing, but more in politics than anywhere else feel free to flaunt the Jolly Roger. And flaunt it they do. Only the politically naïve continue to believe it makes any difference which party, or even which individual, is in power.

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Bring in those checks and balances! With any luck at all, we’ll get gridlock.

And I had a fascinating meeting with a younger man, Jeff Cambra, who is attempting to act as a mediator between the Alameda business community and the school district, gathering people together from business and asking them what sort of new tax proposal would be, in our eyes, fair.

“I don’t even use the word ‘Fair’ anymore,” Jeff says. “I call it ‘Equitable.’” And he smiles, even though I don’t appreciate his distinction.

I’m not exactly hostile to his views, but they confirm for me a deeper understanding of what I already know about politics. A) It’s a swirling, massive cloud of forces, some of them appealing to our rationality, some to our baser instincts and emotions, and everything in-between. B) A very few people can wag the dog, and usually do. NOT consensus, not GroupThink, but the inspired brilliance of a Mad Man or two!

And now that I’m too old and lame to walk the precincts, I think I know my place, sitting by the campfire, pushing twigs into the flames all night, letting my thoughts go where they will, but eventually to the Council of Elders — those players significant enough to understand and appreciate them. That’s why I’m NOT a Jacksonian Democrat! Or a Reagan “New Morning in America” Republican either!

Nope, I’m an Elder of the Tribe, hopelessly Independent and unfettered by sexual desire, ambition or partisanship. When they pass the Peace Pipe, my lips touch it first. And when they don the War Bonnet, mine is more colorful than all the rest!

I wish Jeff Cambra well, but I also know that he’s wasting his time. At least I didn’t let him waste mine. That’s a young man’s game, and I haven’t got time for the pain, haven’t got time for the waste bin, and haven’t got time for the illusions! And from that brief meeting, another epiphany!

The Sunshine Boys

2010-08-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

There is much talk throughout California, and in my beloved hometown of Alameda, about “transparency in government.” Many references to “Sunshine Laws” are made, and here, a “Sunshine Task Force” has emerged to discuss and establish a Sunshine Ordinance to strengthen existing transparency rules. Not every little dark corner of public service, however, is being shone upon.

One local news blog site, for example, ACTION ALAMEDA News, has revealed that an Alameda School Board Trustee, Mike McMahon, has three relatives on the board payroll, including his wife and daughter. And also that the school board, in violation of state and federal law, is accepting Special Education funding without being able to demonstrate a consistent program for finding and recruiting students needing such services, and then providing them. Yet there is no outcry from the Sunshine Boys.

Gadfly Jon Spangler, City Council candidate Jeff Mitchell, and the League of Women Voters all call for more light, so long as it doesn’t shine on them, or any of their pet projects.

Meanwhile, serious charges have been raised against one City Council member, Lena Tam, who is accused of leaking confidential city documents to real estate developer SunCal. Tam’s activities are documented in several hundred pages of emails and inter-office memos CC-ed to the developer and to several local partisans, including a member of the Sunshine Task Force, John Knox-White, and a local blogster, Lauren Do. Again, not only is no concern voiced by the Sunshine Boys, but instead they make excuses for Tam and the others.

At the same time, these Shiny Day People accuse the Interim City Manager and City Attorney of various crimes and misdemeanors, without specifying any codes violated except their own sense of honor. This orb of sunlight appears to be very arbitrary about where it will shine and where it will not.

Some of the public denials of wrongdoing in the Tam case provided much local entertainment, especially the claim that John Knox-White “… did not have text with that woman!” So reminiscent of Bill Clinton, except for the missing sax. And none of these people call for an investigation of the vast SunCal conspiracy to rob the taxpayers.

New Politics in Alameda, and throughout the nation really, are beginning to shape up as the unkindest cuts of all — bitter personal attacks, snarky and smarmy blog commentaries, Tea Party and Town Hall Meeting blockheads, and viral partisanship that brooks no compromise. We can only pray that most of these newbies bought too late and too expensive, that their mortgages are underwater or in default or foreclosure, and that they will soon be packing their bags back to Fresno.

For the Sunshine Boys want to hide away their own pet projects and misdemeanors where the sun don’t shine. Their idea of transparency is a means to embarrass their opponents, not to require full disclosure of the shenanigans of public employees. Not a word from them about unfunded fire fighters union pension perks, let alone exorbitant city executive payrolls.

If they really cared about corruption, equally, on all sides, in the bowels of the school district as much as city management, I’d be impressed. But as it is, all I can see from them is just another partisan smokescreen disguised as something impartial, noble and selfless.

This isn’t, of course, the first time we’ve seen such a song and dance routine in politics. Transparency in government was the claim of Ronald Reagan’s gang, until the Iran-Contra Deal was uncovered. It was also the claim of President Richard Nixon, until those 18 minutes on his office tapes went missing. We know by now that anyone who says he has an exclusive corner on sunlight is coming from the Dark Side.

The Laying On Of Hands

2010-08-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

The American Council of Catholic Bishops has ruled that Reiki, a version of therapeutic touch, or healing massage, is forbidden. No Catholics may practice this healing art, and the priests and nuns who engage in it are hereby ordered to stop. A number of them say they will ignore the Bishops, as do I.

The laying on of hands is a customary method of healing in many cultures and religions. It was practiced by Jesus of Nazareth, who told his disciples to do the same. Until now, Reiki and other similar techniques were practiced everywhere, even in Catholic Hospitals. What now?

Well, for believing Catholics in America, the choices are the same as always. They can pick and choose from a “Menu” of beliefs, ignoring the Church of Rome on Reiki as they do on such issues as birth control and women’s rights. Or else, they can be loyal and true to a hierarchy that seems, with the ascension of former Cardinal “Ratsig,” head of the Catholic Inquisition, increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded.

I’m lapsed, and have no real opinions that matter either way. But I can still criticize the Roman hierarchy, even as I feel the right, even the responsibility, as a lapsed Jew, to criticize Israeli politics. You don’t have to have a dog in that fight anymore to oppose it. And if you lived on the inside for 12 — 16 years, you know more than most laymen.

But this is not about opposition, rather the wonder and the miracle of the laying on of hands. Why is it that the human touch itself should have such miraculous healing powers? What is it in our human and social evolution that sticks with us? Does the grooming of one another, common among all the Five Great Apes, have anything to do with this continued phenomenon? Perhaps.

Chimpanzees are most like the Catholic Bishops, aggressive, domineering, spending most of their time defending their territorial outposts. But they also engage in grooming, stroking and relieving their brothers and sisters of infestations, and simply encouraging each other by physical contact. So do Gorillas. And Orangutans.

But Bonobos, smaller cousins of the Chimps, who live on the other side of the Congo River, are very different. They not only engage in grooming, but spend most of their spare time in sexual interaction rather than in combat. They never quite came down — as we, the Chimps and the others did – out of the trees or depended on an upright posture for their identity. They lay their hands, in a plethora of ways, on each other, calming, comforting, healing each other, more than any of the other Five Great Apes ever do.

We evolve, or suppose we do, from those primate ancestors. We keep a few of the traits and habits that serve our survival well. Perhaps the laying on of hands is one of those practices that sustain us. And why should our religious leaders oppose such a thing?

“It’s only from a direct connection with Jesus that we can trust any healing,” they say. “In this Reiki practice, there appears to be an intermediary, and we can’t know whether that force is divine, or evil.” I would submit that all too often, we cannot tell whether those priestly intermediaries are the real thing, or not…

In the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, which includes the churches in Eureka, where I grew up, more than ten priests are suspected of child molestation, including one of my classmates, Gary Timmons, who died in prison. So much for the laying on of hands.

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

2010-08-09T10:33:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

They ain’t comin’ back. America is in for a decade-long economic slump, similar to the one Japan went through, and for many of the same reasons. Balloon! Balloon! Balloon! One after another, from the internet to housing to investments with Bernie Madoff.

Many of those jobs are in obsolete industries, manufacturing jobs that have gone overseas, jobs in retail industries that have peaked, (such as apparel), jobs in newspaper staffs as advertising moves online. Book publishing and the pulp and paper industries are next, as e-readers gain in popularity.

It is often said that Americans are socially conservative at heart, that our morals change slowly, or not at all. (“Same-sex marriage? Gasp!”). But that viscosity also applies to our workforce, to our education system, to our factory-line mentality, which remain stuck firmly in the past.

No high-speed rail, no new pellet-based nuclear power plants, very little modern architecture. We even stopped making electric cars and destroyed the ones we had.

But only the media, and the Republicans are saying that “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” will be a major issue in the Fall elections. I seriously doubt it. Even if you’re out of work, are you going to blame the President? If you’re an unemployed lifelong Democrat, are you going to vote Republican…to do…what? Get even? Not if you lost your job or your house in 2008.

As usual, the logic is befuddled. Most of those jobs are not coming back, because the American spending binge is over. People who topped out their credit cards are going to be paying them off for the next 10-20 years. They ain’t gonna have any discretionary spending. If Macy’s laid off half their employees, they aren’t going to hire them back. Not ever.

And it will take us at least ten years to develop those new industries that are needed, such as the “Green Revolution” in housing, autos and electric power generation. There is already massive resistance to the kinds of large power lines needed to get electricity from the wind or solar farms onto the grid. And very few bloggers earn more than $500 a year.

Moreover, if the rising federal deficit forces cutbacks in spending, in pushing up the age for collecting social security, cutting back in defense, closing loopholes in Medicare, some people will stay in the workforce longer, and many people in the military and in healthcare will go unemployed. Public employee unions will resist, but there will be layoffs of teachers, city workers and state bureaucrats.

The real estate industry will not recover soon either, with millions of mortgages still underwater, homes in foreclosure or short sale still kept off the market by local banks. They are already suffering badly from the collapse of the commercial real estate market, office buildings sitting empty and vacant lots where only a few years ago massive projects were planned. The million dollar penthouse condo may be a thing of the past.

Along with conspicuous consumption, irrational exuberance and madcap breakfasts at Tiffany’s.

All through the ‘90s and the ‘00s, our economy was grossly inflated, primarily by a willingness of businesses and individuals to go deeply into debt. The big banks and financial institutions are now awash in cash, but not lending, primarily because no one wants to borrow. Even mergers and acquisitions are way down from five years ago.

Japan went through a similar period of inflation during the ‘90s, greatly expanding the public payroll and social welfare benefits, especially for the retired worker. Their deep and serious recession lasted more than ten years. Many Japanese premiers during that period resigned, some in disgrace.

Whether the U.S. government can avoid a similar lasting recession remains to be seen. A recent multi-billion jobs package went primarily to the teachers’ unions, not private sector employment. Teach! Teach! Teach!

Prop. (h) 8

2010-08-05T06:27:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

“My two moms can beat up your ten wives!” So read a sign held by one demonstrator in the face of another, and that’s how heated this debate has been. Yesterday’s ruling will no doubt be appealed, all the way up to the Supreme Court, where a majority of the justices are Catholic. Is this a civil rights issue, or not?

Yesterday, I wore my Prop. (h) 8 T-shirt to our monthly dialysis meeting, and our final one with Nurse Sandy, who has complete our training, and will now be passing us off to Nurse Kate. My T-shirt, turquoise, was from Fifty Seven Thirty Three, a wonderful silk-screening artisnal shop long located next door to Tania & James’ art studio, and now open as a retail shop on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland.

The T-shirt features two lesbians embracing, passionately making out, and reads, “Love is not the problem.” I wore it specifically for good luck in the outcome of yesterday’s ruling, which found the ban on same-sex marriage in California in violation of equal protection and the 14^th Amendment. “Proponents of this ban have offered no rational argument why it should be in force,” read a portion of the ruling.

The exam itself did not go all that well, revealing that I have been retaining fluid from the peritoneal dialysis exchanges. This results in weight gain, high blood pressure, swollen ankles and, most threatening, fluid in the lungs and congestive heart failure. So my nephrologist, on call, promptly ordered some fine tuning in our procedure.

Instead of exchanges at 6 pm, midnight and 6 am, he ordered three overnight, at 6, 9, and 3 am, plus a drain at 6 am, leaving my cavity empty all day. He also told us to use the 2.5 solution, and prescribed large doses of a diuretic. We just had our first such night, and it is almost as disruptive as being on the machine all night long. Very little deep REM sleep and genuine rest. But already I’m losing weight and fluid.

At the end of our session yesterday, after collecting my 24-hour urine draw and samples from all the previous day’s drains, after the Hepetitus B vaccine shot, the thorough exam, change of dressings, blood draw, and scheduling of future appointments — as I was putting my shirts back on, I peeled off the Prop. (h) 8 Tee, folded it gently, and gave it to Nurse Sandy.

“I may be a toughie, and a warrior,” I said to her, “but I’ve been wearing a T-shirt with two nude lesbians on it, and I think you can make even better use of it!” She blushed at the gift, but knows where our sentiments are.

I fought mightily against Prop. (h) 8 myself, a totally unfair and irrational imposition of religious values on a secular citizenry. The Catholic and Mormon Churches spent millions to get it passed — two organizations with a troubled past in the issues of marriage and child molestation and hardly qualified to sit in moral judgment — and then complained when donor lists were made public and donor businesses were boycotted by opponents.

We’ve had our own little dust-up over gay rights here in Alameda, where the schools adopted a curriculum of lesson plans teaching students not to bully gay classmates, or those parented by same sex couples. There was even an attempted recall of school board Trustees, which petered out from lack of support.

I’m confident that the Supreme Court, with its majority of conservatives, will rule against such bans on marriage between consenting same sex adults. Anything else would be judicial activism, and we know how much conservatives hate that stuff.

Is America Really a Democracy?

2010-08-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

The Freedom House, a group that lists countries worldwide by their degree of freedom and democracy, says that among its highest standard are “Transparency and Accountability” of said governments to international standard tests. In many ways, unfortunately, our own American government cannot be given high marks.

Freedom of expression and freedom of association are especially high on the list of Freedom House’s assessments of nations, their laws and their cultures, around the world. In the new democracies, these scores are low, but also in America,. With a media and government increasingly dominated by corporate interests, the news is not good.

“Struggle against Unfair Taxes” is another criteria Freedom House uses. Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine are considered wanting on this list, where peaceful, non-violent pushback against regimes are resisted. But in the U.S., such movements are also resisted and discredited, tax strikers persecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

“Human Rights” are also high on most lists advanced by the United Nations, and also Freedom House. Yet in America, there are now a million black men in prison, all out of proportion to their percentage of the total population. We are hearing more and more immigrant bashing all the time, a thinly-disguised resentment of “those” people who don’t speak English as a first language, who may have darker skin, and whose only European blood comes from Conquistadors.

“Legality” is always given as the excuse, but where was the outrage about Vietnamese undocumented aliens, Afghani war refugees, South Koreans, Filipinos and the like? Many Jewish refugees of Soviet Pogroms also came here without the proper papers in order, but there was no outcry then either. Our border to the North is just as porous as our Southern one, and longer, but we don’t seem to worry about those illegal Canucks!

The most obvious forms of discrimination in America are in our drug laws, which prosecuted and imprison the drug crack cocaine, usually a black inner city ghetto drug, 100 times more harshly than the powdered form, more commonly used by white executive types. Despite recent reforms, the penalties for crack cocaine are still EIGHTEEN times more severe than for powdered Blow.

Many believe that the current drug prohibitions were designed in the first place, especially the marijuana laws, to discriminate against ethnic minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, who were the primary users in the 1930s. Those laws continue to result in far higher imprisonment rates among minorities, and are not only Draconian, but about as effective as the Prohibition Against Alcohol. When will we ever learn?

There’s an old saying that the smaller the venue the more corrupt the government. Too often, public representatives are in collusion with businesses — in California especially with real estate development firms — or with public employee unions. In California, $400 billion is spent on public education, and the opportunities for incompetence and corruption abound. A lack of transparency at the local level makes it almost impossible to uncover waste and fraud.

So it’s not simply a question of whether America is a “perfect” democracy, but how far we need to stray from our democratic ideals of freedom and equality before the term cannot even be applied. If the War in Afghanistan were put to the American people in a democratic referendum, for example, would we still be there? I very seriously doubt it.

But the war makers — from the Pentagon to military manufacturers like Boeing — are in collusion with a media which doesn’t conduct a serious investigation or debate. It takes a blogger like WikiLeak to stimulate any debate at all. So a few Afghani collaborators may be killed? So what? We killed 30 innocent civilians last week alone with our drones. When we pull out, all of the collaborators will be killed, just as they were in France in 1945.

Trickle Down Sex

2010-07-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

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!

Snark City

2010-07-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

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.

How Do You Ask The Last Man To Die?

2010-07-25T06:24:00.001-07:00

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!

Women & The Holocaust

2010-07-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

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!

American Idiots!

2010-07-21T05:13:00.001-07:00

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.

GaGa Over GaGa

2010-07-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Reconciliation

2010-07-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

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.

No Cry Babies!

2010-07-16T06:44:00.001-07:00

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.

Online Learning Redux

2010-07-14T11:41:00.001-07:00

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.

Mama Grizzlies

2010-07-12T05:34:00.000-07:00

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.

A Calling

2010-07-10T06:37:00.001-07:00

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.

American Idiots

2010-07-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

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!

The Other Side of Measure E

2010-07-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

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.

The Fourth Wave

2010-07-02T06:14:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

We are entering a new era of technology. We’re moving beyond the PC and the Mac to SuperSmart Phones and Tablet computers, all of which work with the touch screen and gesture OS, and offer “Facetime” video conferencing, thousands of apps, and will soon include 3-D screens with super-high resolution, above 300 pixels per square inch. And multi-tasking.

A new operating system, with 200 new features, including multi-tasking, will be available free to iPad and iPhone owners in the Fall.

What’s so significant about all this? Well, for one thing, people will soon be carrying these new “mini-computers” with them at all times, with access to the internet, emailing, social networking, gaming, and all the rest. That mobility changes our lives, and could not have been imagined 30 years ago when the first desktop personal computers became available.

From GPS to Google Earth to The Wall Street Journal to an app that you can use to point your SuperSmart Phone at a radio and it will tell you the name of the song that’s playing, as well as the artist and recording company. There are 225,000 apps available for the iPhone and already over 100,000 designed specifically for the iPad. About half of all apps are free, and very few cost more than a few dollars.

In terms of high-speed internet and Wi-Fi availability, the U.S. ranks 18^th among industrialized nations. Americans without SuperSmart phones or tablets are being left even further behind. And Microsoft — once the dominant player in personal computing technology — is absent or at the back of the pack in all these new innovations. Its tablet computer was a failure, its cell phone has a tiny market share, Bing doesn’t seriously threaten Google, and even Windows 7 has been problematic. Microsoft will not be a player in the Fourth Wave.

Interviews with Steve Jobs reveal that he serves not only as CEO but also as Product & Design Manager. And he had set out originally to develop a tablet computer before a SuperSmart phone, but when he saw the potential of the tablet OS, the touch screen, the gesture sensor and multiple applications, he immediately put the tablet on the shelf and put his teams of engineers to work adapting those features to the iPhone, which easily dominates the SuperSmart phone market.

Once the iPhone was launched, Jobs put his engineers back to work on the tablet computer, and just this year the iPad was launched and sold three million units in its first 60 days. While it will not entirely replace the laptop and netbook, it provides a whole new computing experience in many locations where we might not bring one of those devices. Or places where the tablet is simply more convenient, like on board an airliner, for example, or in a Starbucks.

Meanwhile, the apps themselves change the way we do things. Texting, Tweating and chatting on Facebook change the way we communicate. It seems odd now to think back to a time when the only way we could communicate at all across any distance was by talking on the telephone, and one tied to a landline at that! Remember phone booths?

Stuck in dialysis for three hours at a stretch three times a week, I would go nuts without my iPad. On it, I can email, compose poetry and essays, scan the Net, use all the latest news apps — including Newsweek, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal — or just entertain myself with the many apps designed for that, from musical instruments played by touch to an app that shows me the Tokyo skyline, live at any time of day.

Next time you’re stuck in an airport, or in line outside the Apple store, or waiting for a Giants game or a concert to begin, let’s just hope you’ve got your mobile device with you too.

Obama's Vietnam

2010-06-30T05:23:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

I listen to Leon Panetta, head of our CIA, on ABC’s This Week and it’s obvious, as the old French saying goes, that his ass is sucking air. Panetta presides over one of the weakest and most discredited intelligence agencies in the world. The CIA could have foreseen and prevented 9/11 and didn’t. It hasn’t anticipated and prevented the attack on Fort Hood, the Detroit Bomber, the Times Square Bomber, or come anywhere close to finding Osama bin Laden.

“He’s somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” Panetta says, and then adds, “We haven’t had any certain location intelligence on him since the early 2000’s.” Wow! America, the most powerful nation in the world, and we can’t even find one terrorist, lost track of him almost ten years ago, and with all those satellites, all that money, all those agents, no results. Failure.

Panetta also reminds me of the national leaders lying to us during the Vietnam War. He attempts to assert that we are having success against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but other reports, (Face the Nation), make it clear that we are failing in that effort too. He can’t even explain precisely how the Taliban is a threat to the security of the United States, except to say that “They are willing to harbor Al Qaeda, who are still trying to attack us here.”

Neither Panetta, nor Obama, nor Clinton, nor anyone else can explain how North Korea or Iran pose a threat to our security. Even if they acquire nuclear weapons, so what? The Soviet Union had more warheads than we did, and the “Mutually Assured Destruction” clause prevented both sides from using them. If either Iran or North Korea launched a missile in our direction, we would retaliate with hundreds of our own long-range missiles, and wipe them off the face of the earth. Suicide bombers with suitcase nukes? Don’t make me laugh.

Just as our invasion of Iraq was totally unjustified, based on lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction, our entire involvement in the Middle East lies on a platform of lies and exaggerations. Incompetence made 9/11 possible, and we can only hope those agencies responsible for our security are now on their toes. But if Obama perpetuates the conflict in Afghanistan, especially using the strategy of Counter-Insurgency, he is doomed to become another LBJ.

Using a “Counter-Terrorism” strategy instead, however, has one big disadvantage to our Military. It doesn’t require 150,000 troops on the ground. Perhaps as few as 10,000, and a more efficient use of drones and the occasional commando attack on Al Qaeda across the border into Pakistan. Illegal? So what? If we can invade Iraq, we can certainly penetrate Pakistan from time to time.

But our Military needs and wants a full-scale force deployed in Afghanistan to retain the kind of power they have during wartime. Are we, as Obama said, “A nation at war?” Doubtful. Except for those Jarheads and Special Forces, Navy SEALS, Blackhawks and others, nobody knows and nobody cares, except to wonder why we spend all those trillions and all those lives. For oil? For Israel? Certainly not for the U.S. of A.

Panetta explains how “excellent” the CIA has become, since the bad old days when it couldn’t find its own ass with both hands. And again, he is about as convincing as General Westmoreland explaining how much we were winning “Hearts & Minds” in Vietnam by burning hooches. Yep.

One of the reasons Americans have lost faith in their own government is the pathetic War in Afghanistan. And the more President Obama ties his destiny to outcomes there, the more miserable and forsaken that destiny will be.

The 2//3 Rule

2010-06-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

This year, California voters and legislators have an opportunity to make some very significant choices. There’s the race for Governor, the legalization of Marijuana, and perhaps most importantly, for the legislators, a choice between “Feed the Beast” or “Starve It.” The perception of runaway government could easily stop here.

It’s been stopped in its tracks in the U.S. Senate, where the two-thirds rule has become the norm. With the increased use of the filibuster, by both parties, it now takes a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done. Considering the mischief that body is usually up to, I believe that’s a very good thing.

The use of the parcel tax initiative to get around the will of the people in California to limit property taxes with Prop. 13, is compromised by the requirement of a 2/3 majority voter approval. That compromise has not prevented the passing of a bundle of parcel taxes in Alameda, including five for the public schools, to supplement the $80 million a year they receive from regular property taxes.

But that 2/3 majority also saved us from Measure E, the most recent, and most horrendous demand from the schools, to preserve their status quo while unemployment, foreclosures, defaults and deficits characterize this recession for the rest of us. Even so, only 35% of registered voters said “Yes on E,” but with a turnout of barely 50%, one more percentage point, a democratic minority of 36% could have put it in force.

That means, with a 50% passage, only 26% of registered voters could pass any initiative. We’ll see how that plays out in Sacramento and then express our own views in November.

Legislators can vote for the “Passing the Budget on Time” initiative, which would eliminate the 2/3 requirement for all California initiatives, or for the “Stop Hidden Taxes” initiative, which would impose the 2/3 requirement on virtually all state and local government fiscal initiatives. I know how I’m telling my representatives to vote.

Much of the anger toward government — coming not from just the Tea Party but from those of us who see its bureaucracies as bloated and overpaid and in cahoots with multinational corporations — is the perception that civil servants hardly serve, and haven’t taken the hits from the recession that workers in the private sector have.

Much of the money from the $800 Billion Stimulus package have gone to saving the jobs of teachers, police and fire, or creating many new public service positions. The problem with that: product and manufacturing innovation, creating new value, happens only in the private sector. In the public sector, only “services” are provided, often of a dubious nature. Many taxpayers don’t benefit from such public services at all.

Moreover, those public payrolls are bloated. Fire and police unions resist layoffs, or the closing of precincts or fire stations of doubtful usage. Reading the local fire report or police blotter, we see many activities that hardly justify those generous salaries and retirement benefits. In Alameda, police and fire personnel can retire at age 50 with 75% of their final year’s salary, often over $100,000.

Liberals say “Raise taxes,” or “Do away with Prop. 13,” and those sentiments make me loath to be in their camp on those or other issues. Nor am I in sympathy with so-called “conservatives,” who defend hundreds of billions of wasted tax dollars in “Defense” spending. I’m just an old tax resister. Curmudgeon? Or Wise Old Tribal Elder…?

But when I see how our government spends the billions it already gets, I’m glad the 2/3 majority rule is a possible hedge against them taking even more.

No One There Gets Out Alive

2010-06-28T06:35:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

A group of mothers of a squad of young men serving in Iraq gets together for the first time. Only one of the men is still alive, and he is brain-damaged and severely compromised. One of the mothers says, “My other boy escaped the war uninjured and came back alive. But the person he was when he went off to fight never did come back. In a sense, that boy also died.”

And I realize that there are no survivors of war. And I’m not even sure any longer that any of us survive our stateside combat situations. With every major loss, or setback, illness or injury, a piece of us dies too. And yet, I can still sense the presence, inside me, of my old self, who has never really changed at all. It’s the same self as the one I could feel inside me when I was five years old. “Me TOO!” he shouts, and jumps up and down with joy.

But war must be the most horrible experience of all. The closest I’ve ever come is resisting the National Guard during war protests in Isla Vista following the murders of those four students at Kent State. (“Four dead in Ohio!” as CSNY sang…) And even in those campus and street protests there were moments of sheer terror.

And I realize a lot of the clothing I’ve bought in the last five years has a certain military flair about it — shirts and jackets with epaulets, camo patterns, (both dramatic camo or faint and subtle versions, in jungle green and desert gray or brown…), snaps and belts and zippers. I also sometimes tuck my pants cuffs into the tops of my boots, which themselves have a military look, the overall effect quite soldierly.

Commentators tell us that we’re completely oblivious to the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I think that’s bull, that in reality we are depressingly, if unconsciously, aware of it all the time. That awareness, the pain of that awareness, has crept into our fashions, where cultural awareness lurks but reigns supreme, at least for a dandy like me.

Even those many graphic skulls are an echo of the battlefield, not some worldwide plague. And war is NOT a worldwide plague. Some nations, like Cuba, are positively peaceful.

Citizens of a nation at war, let alone one seemingly at perpetual war, also suffer a terrible toll. Knowing that we pay taxes to support the war, that our neighbors’ children go off to fight there, maybe die or come back injured or changed utterly and not for the better, that innocent civilians in those far-off lands are dying too…does NOT enrich our karma, or our lives… unless, that is, we manufacture weapons of destruction.

It seems that for my nearly 70 years of life, America has been at war more of those years than we’ve been at peace. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq. My God in Heaven! We have a warlike nature.

So we are either a most belligerent people, or we really are the “Peacekeepers” we keep telling ourselves we are. Of course, on the wild wild Western frontier, the Colt .45 was called The Peace Maker too.

Genetics. I suspect that the more violent a nation’s history is, the more likely the violent and belligerent are to survive, and come to dominate the gene pool. “Everybody OUT of the pool!” It’s a wicked place to be.

If I go live on another planet, another dimension, I only hope I’m among a more peaceful breed of creatures. Bonobos perhaps.

Roll Away the Stone!

2010-06-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

General McChrystal revisited. A close examination of the Rolling Stone article, (I subscribe!), reveals that it’s about a lot more than loose lips, but rather a huge failure of policy. Counter-Insurgency, (COIN), may have worked to some degree in Iraq, but it isn’t working in Afghanistan at all. McChrystal was fast losing the support of President Karzai, Ambassador Hollbroke, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton, and even his own men.

COIN assumes a large degree of nation-building parallel to the armed combat pushing the Taliban our of certain villages and regions. That requires a strong and respected central government, a clear distinction between civilians and the enemy, and an ability to protect those civilians from intimidation and slaughter by the enemy, and also by our own troops. Avoiding that “collateral damage,” McChrystal’s own fighters claim, is impossible in Afghanistan. “So all a Taliban fighter has to do is lay down his gun, and he’s an innocent civilian and we can’t fire on him or defend ourselves!” says one.

If you roll away the Rolling Stone, you get a view of that war that you won’t see on TV, especially on Fox Noose. The article reveals a bitter division between command and fighting force that we haven’t seen since the worst days of Vietnam. The twisted logic of our presence there also alienates the American public from the conflict in ways we haven’t seen since ‘Nam either.

I can just imagine…well, I don’t have to…I can hear their voices in this article, what it feels like to be risking your life in an unpopular war hampered by an unworkable policy and a strategy that puts you out there, vulnerable to attack by IED or sniper, not being able to tell the enemy from the friend…strike that…having no friends, but surrounded by suspicious and hostile villagers who may not shoot you…may not harbor those who will…no win, no “victory” possible, just more stalemate.

During the last half of the 70s, most of the 80s and 90s, the U.S. military was frustrated by the failure of Vietnam. This frustration shows in McChrystal’s voice as he chaffs against those who disagree with him. In fact, as the reporter for Rolling Stone and his editors say, the General had the opportunity to review the article before its publication, for fact-checking. He knew exactly what was in it and how it would be received. He is quoted as saying he wanted to “send a message” back to Washington with its content.

He had sent messages before — with a speech in London, for example, during Obama’s period of assessment, calling for 40,000 more troops and a confirmation of his policy, preempting his Commander-in-Chief. He had been warned, and obviously ignored the warning. But the issue here is more than a Top General with very poor judgment. It is a question of why in the hell are we there at all, and especially pursuing a doomed strategy.

There are no Sunnis in Afghanistan, as there are in Iraq. Afghanistan is a failed state that was easily, after the Soviet defeat, taken over by an Islamic Extremist party, the Taliban, easily pushed aside by our invasion, but barely kept contained as an insurgency.

The alternative is a “Counter-Terrorist” strategy that contains and winnows away at Al Qaeda with drones, keeps very few troops on the ground defending the borders, and lets the Afghanis decide how to deal with the Taliban.

The right wing here claims that it’s the deadline for the beginning of withdrawal that makes the COIN policy unworkable. That shows the same fundamental misunderstanding of Afgani culture, society and politics that General McChrystal displayed. And even his own troops saw through that myth.

Mutiny on the Bounty

2010-06-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

In some Third World countries, military coups against a civilian government are still common. In America, the balance of power between the military establishment and civilian government has always been contentious, going back to General/President Washington’s support for the Federalist Papers, which encouraged a powerful central government and a very strong military, versus Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, James Monroe and the other Anti-Federalists, who didn’t want so much power vested in a potential “monarchy.”

Chain of Command is vested in America in the hands of a civilian Commander in Chief managing the military, but that scheme of things, settled in our Constitution, is being challenged. It’s not just General McChrystal who is out of bounds, but the entire Military/Industrial Complex. And the threat to our democracy is very real.

Many Americans want us out of Afghanistan, not just Iraq, and I’m one of them. But after long deliberation, President Obama was persuaded, or pressured by the Generals, to commit more troops in a Surge in Afghanistan instead of getting out now. All reports are that the Anti-Terrorist campaign against Al Qaeda is fairly successful, the Anti-Insurgency campaign to unite and stabilize Afghanistan championed by McChrystal is a dismal failure.

Afghan President Karzai has threatened to join the Taliban, and has been at times alienated from Ambassador Holbrooke and Vice President Biden, both of whom were targets of McChrystal’s unfortunate insubordination during combat operations in the field. The story in Rolling Stone reveals that the General encouraged the same insubordinate spirit among his own subordinates toward civilian oversight.

Combat encourages a certain “Hot Dog” spirit among troops in the field. Moreover, 7,000 casualties in ten years make Afghanistan a nightmare of frustration for the warriors serving there. Up against a deadline for troop withdrawal, a failing strategy, a hostile or indifferent U.S. public, it is understandable that such sentiments would arise. But a General who broke military code sets a precedent for rebellious, even treasonous attitudes that our democracy cannot tolerate.

So now, it’s even more important that we get out of Afghanistan. Obama should shorten the time-table he imposed on the Generals. That country and culture does not lend itself to the so-called “Anti-Insurgency” strategy developed by General Petreus and pursued by McChrystal. Even more so than Iraq, it is a tribal country ruled by village and regional war lords that never have and never will be faithful and loyal to a strong central government. Even our allies know that, and are leaving.

None of our Generals make any sense when they say that we must make a “long-time commitment” of twenty years or more to Afghanistan. You hear in their voices a narrow, military perspective that is neither strategic nor tactical, but merely self-serving. “War is Job One!” they seem to be saying.

“No, it’s not!” we citizens reply. “Freedom is Job One, and that means freedom from the kind of foolishness that got us into the Middle East up to our asses in the first place.” We’re fighting for oil, and neither Chevron nor BP is picking up the tab. As for Israel, after 50 years of maximum U.S. support, let them fend for themselves.

Mutinous thoughts, I know. But Mutiny is as Mutiny does. I cannot be loyal to a government that is controlled by a powerful military in cahoots with arms manufacturers and such mercenary units as Blackwater or Halliburton. Even General/President Washington warned us against a standing military, as General/President Eisenhower warned us against the burgeoning military/industrial complex. They should know.

Measure E Fails

2010-06-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

At this hour, with only a few hundred votes left to be counted, Alameda voters have apparently rejected Measure E, the school parcel tax which would have given this island city some of the highest school taxes in the Bay Area, if not the nation. They would have cost homeowners $659 a year, and commercial property owners as much as $9,500 per year per parcel. It would have raised $14 million per year for eight years, on top of $80 million per year going to the schools from regular property taxes.

I’ve already taken down my “No on E” yard sign. For one thing, it’s not polite to gloat, and for another, I expect a vicious and violent backlash from sore losers who exhibited such behavior during the campaign. Yard signs opposing the new tax have been stolen or defaced. Merchants displaying “No on E” window signs have been threatened with boycotts. One immigrant store owner was cursed and told to “go back where you came from.”

These Gestapo tactics were meant to intimidate opponents of the school tax in the most bitter, divisive and undemocratic campaign conducted in this town in recent memory. Regardless of the final outcome, bad feelings are likely to linger for many months.

And so will school parcel taxes. In a “Heads I win/Tails you lose” strategy, the defeat of Measure E will leave in place two previous taxes, Measures A & H, until the end of 2012. Opponents expect AUSD to come at us again before they expire, with yet another parcel tax proposal. Funds leftover from the Measure H campaign already constitute a potential war chest for just such an effort.

Just a few months ago, Alameda voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative granting an Orange County developer, SunCal, exclusive rights to impose their plan on Alameda Point, site of the former Naval Air Station, without adequate compensation to the City. We voted 85% to 15% against the proposal.

Yet, SunCal has persisted in its negotiations with City “leaders” to proceed with nearly the very same plan — with only very modest changes to get around the ordinance limiting the size of new housing — in a brazen denial of voter’s clear message. So the precedent is there for the school district to do the same.

I have been very active and vociferous in the opposition to Measure E, writing many articles for publication in local newspapers and online news sites, as well as my own blog. And for exercising my Second Amendment freedom of speech rights, I have been called a “curmudgeon,” “pathetic” and “misguided.” As if I have no right to my opinion.

And that opinion is far better informed than most of the yahoos who have been insulting me. I have fourteen years experience as a classroom teacher, have thoroughly researched the need for Reform in America’s public education system, as well as finding data which refutes the claims that all our parcel taxes have produced “excellence” in our schools.

If anything, this campaign has kept my adrenalin levels fairly high, and that’s probably a good thing. Simultaneously fighting kidney failure and dialysis, the political knife fight has kept me on my toes, provided a useful distraction from the illness, and given me a deep sense of satisfaction in articulating my own views.

Now, we’ll see if all the doomsday scenarios come true, if half the schools are closed, 70 teachers laid off, and those remaining so discouraged by the voters clear message that they either slack off in their teaching or move to a more affluent district with higher pay rates, like Orinda.

Resist Socialism!

2010-06-21T06:08:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

All during the Cold War, Americans feared the brand of socialism known as “Communism.” Income redistribution, and a nation organized along the lines of extreme equality. But today, if there is any socialist threat, it is the radical and authoritarian form of National Socialism known as “Fascism,” which seeks to organize the state around corporate values, a strong and authoritarian central government, and racism, and rejects individualism as antithetical to the collective will of the people.

Few Americans today, only those over 70, remember the rise of Fascism in both Italy and Germany, culminating in the Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler, with his storm troopers, his blitzkrieg and his concentration camps leading to the Holocaust. These Fascists believed that it was essential to have the will and the ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.

If some of these features begin to sound hauntingly familiar, you’re right. America, since the late Sixties, has come to resemble more a Fascist state practicing national socialism than the “Red Commies,” “Pinkos” or “Fellow Travelers” feared in the Fifties and early Sixties. Current events push us even farther in that direction.

Since Richard Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1971, the dollar has been a “floater.” That is, with its value tied to nothing but the credit worthiness of the United States Treasury, its ability to borrow and print more money, our economy has been vulnerable to one balloon and recession after another, which simply strengthen the positions of corporations. The so-called “TARP” bailout for financial and banking corporations in 2008 was only the most recent example of a bubble bursting and the Fed essentially nationalizing those corporations.

In recent memory, the bailout of Chrysler and of the Savings & Loan industry are further examples of this radical trend. Even President Obama has gotten into the act, basically nationalizing Chevrolet and now faced with the prospect of keeping British Petroleum alive so they can stop their spill, clean up the horrible mess and compensate the victims. What is that $20 billion “slush fund” if not a nationalization of its assets?

The Tea Party Movement has it all wrong. It’s not that government is taking over the corporations — rather that the corporations have already taken over our government. Goldman-Sachs alumni dominating Treasury and the Fed, corporate lawyers elected to Congress, and more corporate lobbyists swarming over Washington than termites on an old wooden house.

In California, we are told by two former corporate CEOs — Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina — that knowing how to run a big business qualifies them to manage our government affairs. Fiorina neglects to mention that her management style almost drove Hewlett-Packard into bankruptcy. And people who know government, and its ways, say that corporate management — which tends to be authoritarian — is far from the democratic process.

Racism in America today most often takes the form of a cry against “Immigrants!” While at the same time exploiting their labor…

Nearly all of the Fortune 500 corporations pay very little in taxes to the government, and many of them profit from various subsidies, low royalties for access to national resources such as timber, oil and coal. As we’re learning from the BP Oil Spill, powerful corporations have their way with government, with the environment, and with us.

Eisenhower warned us about the growing “Military/Industrial Complex,” for that was an example of national socialism. He had fought Fascism and the Nazis in Europe during World War II, and knew what it looked like when corporations begin to control the military, and a nation keeps going to war for no apparent reason except to demonstrate its own power.

Resist Socialism! National Socialism, that is. It’s in control of the United States of Beneton, but we can still take our country back.

The Achievement Gap

2010-06-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

That’s how it’s referred to euphemistically by the Alameda School District Trustees and Superintendent, “the achievement gap.” Instead, it’s the failure of the schools, and the teachers, to close that gap for African-American and Hispanic students. While the unemployment rate for Americans in general is around 10%, for African-Americans, it is 15%. And that’s an achievement gap directly traceable back to the schools.

But no one wants to admit that. The new parcel tax initiative in Alameda doesn’t even promise to address that gap, and there is no language in the new “Master Plan” describing or explaining why such a gap exists. Nor why that gap is much greater in the West End schools than in the Gold Coast or the East End or in Harbor Bay. No one admits that the schools, and the teachers, are just plain failing these kids, in real time, in the classroom, and then in their grade books.

The drop-out rate is much higher, and the graduation and success rate much lower for these ethnographic groups than for “White” and “Asian” students, and the conventional explanation is all about culture, that these kids don’t learn English, that their parents don’t believe in education as a way out of the ghetto, that they are undisciplined and unruly. Anything but admitting any responsibility for maintaining discipline and order, and motivating the students to learn.

It’s definitely time to reform education in America, and the public schools. Or to make “vouchers” available to parents who want to choose instead to enroll their children in private schools. Why should we support a failing system, when Catholic schools graduate 90% of their students, and a charter school in Oakland, “Native American Charter School,” graduates 100%, and they all qualify for admission to quality universities?

Vouchers used to be the call-letters of conservatives, and especially of the Religious Right. No one paid much attention, except the teachers’ unions, which made fun of the notion. Why should private schools be allowed to compete on a level playing field with the public schools? Why should the public schools have any fair competition? Indeed.

But tenure and the seniority/senility system have ruined public schools. They give teachers lifetime job security, regardless of their real performance, and allow the oldest and some of the most sleepy-time, to keep their jobs instead of younger, more fired-up teachers, in the face of the few layoffs that get past the unions.

The achievement gap is horrible in its consequences, and very costly. Public school dropouts constitute a much higher percentage of prison inmates than graduates, are much more vulnerable to STDs and other communicable diseases, more likely to go on welfare and drugs, and the achievement failure of their schools, and their teachers, will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

As a former teacher, I’m angry. And I blame my former colleagues, who refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever for the fact that America spends more per student than any nation on earth, and its students score in the bottom third worldwide. This is an achievement gap that will surely make America a third-rate power, economically and in terms of innovation, unless we reform the public education system NOW!

The Fine Art of Flirting

2010-06-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

I sent an email to a lovely chum recently about flirting, and among the things I said are these: “Understand this: there IS no competition. You are one of a kind. Every woman is one of a kind, and my affections for women do not overlap in any way. I do not compare them, play them off against each other, or try to be with more than one at a time. If I'm there, I'm there 100%.

“Flirting is simply the way men and women bond in affection, a way of saying, ‘I really like you. I think you're neat, and bright and lovely and fun.’ Men bond with each other through horseplay, teasing, ‘capping’ on each other and putting each other down. From about age five onward. You see it all the time at the Tree.”

And as I was writing these sentiments, I realized just how important they are. I often have a dozen flirtations going on at any one time in my life, and they don’t compete or overlap, but exist solely on their own. They don’t threaten my relationship with Diane, don’t lead to love affairs, (anymore), but are often as deep and passionate as the best such affairs, which, for me, have also been great friendships.

I am crazy about women, and not just in a sexual or romantic way. I love talking to them, getting their slant on things, seeing them having a good time. Some of my best friends are lesbians, and I even dated one for a year, without ever getting even a goodnight kiss. They think and feel differently from us men, and way differently from gay men. Fag hag? Who’s zooming whom?

I tend to be drawn to very independent, strong-willed women. Feisty, sassy, confident enough to have a sense of humor, even about themselves. We’re told by some that this is the “new breed” of liberated, modern woman, but I suspect they’ve been around all along. What has changed in my lifetime is the role they’re expected to fill in society.

Very few of the women I know are married, or stay married. Most of them have lively, successful careers, or at least jobs that support them which they also enjoy. Some of them are lonely, have pretty much given up on the notion or expectation that they will find long-term, full-time companionship with a partner, either male or female.

What the media calls the greater opportunities available to women can also be a tremendous weight of responsibility. Not only do they not, or cannot, depend on men, or a man, to take care of them, but they often find themselves caring for an aged parent, or rearing their children all alone. As they assume higher and higher roles in management and politics, they also discover how lonely it can be at the top.

There is talk these days about “The End of the Man’s World” and I can’t help but feel sorry for my women friends. If you’re going to inherit the earth, I think, we’ll all be watching to see how much better a job you do with it. No wars? No crime? No divorce or domestic violence? No corruption? A kinder, gentler world? We’ll see.

In the meantime, some of the most pleasurable moments of my life are those times I’m flirting with a woman. We both know we like it, we want to, we might, we could, and we won’t. Not in this lifetime anyway.

Israel Takes the Bait

2010-06-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

Once again, the Israeli government, and especially its commando raiders, showed particularly poor judgment in the attack on a flotilla of humanitarian aid bound for Gaza. Once again — as in their invasion of southern Lebanon and their brutal attack on Gaza last year — our favored nation Jewish state has blundered sorely enough to bring down worldwide condemnation, and to threaten relations with their only Arab ally, Turkey.

After meeting with Vice President Biden, Egyptian officials announced that they are opening their borders to Gaza for the delivery of humanitarian aid and limited travel, a decision prompted by the attack.

Killing nine and wounding dozens more, many of them critically, the Israeli commandos say they were merely defending themselves, but films show that the contest between “blunt instruments” and automatic weapons was anything but fair. But the worst of it is the arrogance and indifference Israel displayed toward world opinion. Independent observers searched the flotilla for weapons before embarking, and they say there were none on board, and no captured guns of any kind have been displayed by the Israelis.

Someone is lying.

And what is that to U.S.? Well, Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda all say that our unflagging support of Israel, no matter what it does, and our failure to criticize its actions, except continued settlements in Palestinian territory, justifies attacks on the U.S. and its citizens “by any means necessary.” And they may actually be right. Not morally, but correct in their logic by Aramaic standards.

The willful killing of civilians during wartime is terrorism, whether it’s 9/11, drone murders in Afghanistan or civilians in Lebanon and Gaza.

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 Americans have died in two wars to avenge the 3,000 killed on 9/11. You do the math and tell me how “effective” and “exceptional” that is. A five year old can tell you it’s nuts.

So are we an exceptionally violent and stupid people? And why did President Obama, skeptical of both wars during his campaign, change his mind and imitate his predecessor’s “Surge” in Afghanistan, leading to many civilian casualties from the very imperfect drones, and a surge in American deaths as well? The current issue of Rolling Stone says, “Oil.”

That old saying, “Follow the money,” seems to be pertinent again. Corruption at the highest levels of our government, in both parties? Oh, say it isn’t so, Joe

Campaign election law suggestion: prohibit any donations to legislators from any corporations or special interests which will be affected by legislation under consideration by those legislators, either in committee or on the floor of Congress, or by the Executive branch in its proposals and vetoes. Radical. Yes. But so American!

Make the lobbyists AND the legislators punishable by imprisonment and huge fines for violating this law. Banish offenders forever from the halls of Congress, from running even for dog catcher in their home towns. Tattoo their foreheads with the symbol for fraud and deceit: “INC.” For “Incapacitated.”

Require the same sort of transparency and firewall at the Pentagon. No hob-nobbing between generals and defense contractors, between even Pentagon minions and lowlings from companies like Boeing and Winchester Arms. Same penalties, same tattoo on the forehead, but with a pentagon, five-sided geometric symbol added.

Then see if our leaders are so eager to take us off to war, or keep us there. And if they do, always vote against the ones who vote to take us there, or keep us there, as we voted against Hillary Clinton and John McCain, those numbskulls.

I do not expect such changes in our laws, or our national character, during my lifetime. But I’ll tell you, one incentive I have for stretching out the years left to me is the hope that such a change might come about. Instead of shunning the veterans returning from Vietnam, we should have shunned the generals, the politicians and the weapons manufacturers who sent them there!

Israel always takes the bait, much to its chagrin, but so do we, its most powerful and influential ally. An affinity made in Hell.

Governor Moonbeam

2010-06-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

What do you get when a moonbeam matures? A ray of light. Hah! Just got my “Jerry Brown/Governor/2010” T-shirt, lawn sign and collectible button. I’m an official volunteer for the campaign, and they have used some of the language I’ve sent them as Jerry speaks to nurses’ unions and other simpatico groups. And, unlike Nutmeg’s people, we’re not Brown Shirts. Mine is black.

We’ve all watched here in California as Whitman does her best to buy the office, but chances are the voters are too smart for that. A Huffington tried that a generation ago and failed, and only his ex-wife remains in any spotlight. We American voters will not be bought.

Jerry Brown did something when he was Governor of California in the Seventies that has put our state ahead of all others in the Green Movement. He put into effect building standards that make all buildings in California put up since 1979 80% more efficient in heating and cooling than they ever were before. And building energy use is 40% of all U.S. energy consumption, compared to automobiles at 30% of the total.

And our automobiles, thanks to initiatives taken by Brown, are constantly ahead of the rest of the country in mileage standards and pollution control — so much so that everyone from Chevron to Chevrolet continually attempts to have them declared illegal. President Obama’s new energy plan would make both our automobile and building energy conservation standards nationwide.

I have a personal interest in all this. In 1996 I met him in a meeting we undertook on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce in an attempt to mediate the dispute between the City of Alameda and the Port of Oakland over noise control standards applying to the Oakland Airport. That meeting was arranged by then-publisher Chip Brown. Anticipating that Brown would be elected, we asked him to be “A kindly, more gentle neighbor to Alameda.”

Jerry and I hit it off at that meeting, in a small office in his gigantic loft building headquarters in Oakland, and he impressed me so much that I walked across the big loft floor with him and asked him how I could help with his first campaign for Mayor of that fair city. I spent most of that summer writing pitches, stuffing envelopes and answering phone banks in that loft building, until my heart attack and failing stents made it impossible.

During that time, I had enough contact and observation of the man, his friends and his dedicated co-workers that I was greatly impressed. And his two terms as Mayor of Oakland saw more progress than in the previous 30 years or all the years under Ron Dellums since. He brought 2,000 more federal office workers and the buildings housing them to downtown Oakland, financed the resurrection of Telegraph Avenue and Grand Avenue, the demolition of Pioneer Square and the consolidation of businesses in Jack London Square, and a vast expansion of the Port of Oakland shipping crane facilities along with a good-neighbor policy by the Airport.

I saw the Alameda Chamber as a powerful political force, and with the help of Paul Fossum made it so, something it has not been since our involvement there. And in the course of that effort, I made many new friends and allies, and Governor Moonbeam was one of those, one of the very best!

So I wear my Jerry Brown for Governor T-shirt, and sport the lawn sign, with not only great pride, but with some of my best memories from my many political campaigns and adventures. Just say no to Nutmeg, and vote for Jerry!

No Amnesty!

2010-06-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

by Chief Lone Wolf

As a member of the Lakota tribe, I share the universal Native American resentment of European illegal immigrants and their descendents. They did not apply for citizenship, take a test, wait in long lines to qualify for our approval, pay us for our land or mineral rights, instead stole our land, the gold beneath it, slaughtered us and the great prairie herds of buffalo, and imprisoned the few tribal survivors on reservations, where they could neither hunt nor graze their ponies nor practice their nomadic way of life.

They made no effort to learn our language, our culture or our religion. Instead, they made every effort to impose their foreign (and often forked) tongue upon us. They stole our children, put them in Christian missionary schools, cut their hair, forbade the wearing of native dress or speaking of our language and the practice of any rituals of our culture and religion.

These illegal immigrants laid claim to “citizenship” by right of arms, and claimed that their European offspring, merely because they were born here, could be called “American.” Only very recently have they honored any of their promises in treaties signed with us, or shown any respect at all for our native customs.

They have even granted us the honorific, gratuitous title of “Native Americans.” Which suggests we might have been here first, and that they are not only late-comers, but the real illegal immigrants.

And their arrogance doesn’t stop there. Now there is a movement afoot called “The Tea Party” which promotes the slogans, “Close Our Borders!” and “No Amnesty!” One of their figurehead leaders is a woman who hails from Wasilla, Alaska, once the home of the noble Inuit tribe, but overrun by drunken gold miners from the south and eventually conscripted as a state of the union.

These people are intent on barring the return of any brown-skinned people to the continental United States. Although the territories of California and most of the seven western states were seized illegally and by force from those same people’s ancestors, their attempts to return are made the butt of jokes and threats. “Wetbacks” they are called, “Taco Belles” and “Beaners.”

The most lawless people on earth, white Americans, charge that these “illegal aliens” are breaking the law. Whose law? By what precedence? Many of those brown-skinned people are descended from the very tribes that once populated all of North and South and Central America, later their bloodlines fouled by the European Spanish conquerors, and later the French. Where is the justice in this?

“We stole this land fair and square!” is all the white settlers can say. “Might makes right.” “If you’re black, get back, but if you’re brown you can stick around to mow my lawn.” Brown-skinned “illegals” are the slave laborers of today. Liberated mothers paying their nannies $2.00 an hour.

And The Louisiana Purchase? From the French?

I only wish one of these Tea Party people would come upon my land. I haven’t taken a scalp in years! And as for this whole debate about immigration, and “illegals” I can tell you exactly who is the illegal alien. And for him, for them, for YOU…NO AMNESTY! No justice, no peace.

Respecting the Source

2010-06-05T06:03:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

I listen to Neil Young talk about how he writes his songs, “It just comes to me. It’s a gift. And I have to pick up the gift. What kind of respect would it be for me to ignore it? And if I don’t pick it up, right away, the minute it comes, it won’t be there. You have to respect the source.”

He also talks about having a serious illness, with a brain aneurism that almost killed him, and how an elderly black woman sat by his hospital bed, held his hand, and talked to him, saying, “He’s not going to take you. You’re going to be alright. The Master loves you.” And I envy him that moment. But for Neil Young, that whole experience did the same thing it did for me, left him with a spiritual certainty, non-specific, non-denominational, but very deep and very real.

Respecting the source, I know that in my own life I’ve been gifted too. Oh, not to the degree at all that Neil Young has been. But I’ve been able to be a writer, to make my living at it, to write also just for fun, to write novels, short stories, poems, commentary, even newspaper articles. I’ve written millions of words and enjoyed them all. I’ve been gifted with this.

One story I wrote in my early twenties, “Yellow Bird,” is my personal favorite. It’s about an elderly widow who talks to her canary. A sweet little vignette, it’s not more than two and a half pages long, but it resonates. And, like most of my stories, it’s not entirely made up, based on real life but with a twist. The story, a chapter from my first novel, Sketches of Boyhood & Youth, was published in the UCSB literary magazine, Spectrum, in 1964.

I also did a lot of writing for advertising clients. Some of the finest work I did over the years was for rehab programs, and two tag lines stand out in my memory: “Take Hold of Your Life Before It Slips Away,” and another, which is still used by Mountain Vista Farms in their TV commercials: ‘”Change Your Perspective, Change Your Life.” A different kind of poetry.

Dealing with people, getting their stories, their perspectives, getting to the heart of what they do and who they are — these are the chops I learned first as an editor at the University interviewing professors and writing their profiles. A journalistic exercise, but it also served me very well in the business of marketing and advertising. Capturing the essence of what a client does.

Most recently, I had several stories and poems published in Red Hills Review, a ‘zine created, edited and published by Julia Parks. And I had a great deal of fun writing my column “Geezerville: A Wry Take On Aging” in the Alameda Sun, another project of Julia’s, and also giving workshops at her “Literati Book Fair,” held at the former Officer’s Club at the Base.

So my full life has been greatly enriched by this one particular gift, a gift of gab, a writer’s voice, and ideas, phrases, voices that come to me from the Source. Because it’s given me so much joy and just plain entertainment, I respect that Source and am in perpetual awe and wonder.

Grace Under Pressure

2010-06-04T07:01:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

That was Hemingway’s definition of courage: “Grace under pressure.” Whether his final act of suicide was courageous I hesitate to say. His family believe it was, and that’s all that really matters.

I always thought of my father as a very stoic man, silent, withdrawn, even taciturn. But lately I’ve changed my mind.

He certainly had his sorrows. He and his first wife went through a very wrenching, painful divorce in their early twenties. During the Depression, he rode the rails looking for work and went for days at a time without eating. At 32, he almost died in a tragic sawmill accident, and lost the use of his left arm. And at the end, he died a slow and lingering, painful death of lung disease, on oxygen for five years.

But he never complained. And I heard some writerly advice the other day that helps me better understand his silence, and also points the way to a new direction for myself. An editor advised a man about to write a book about the premature death of his daughter, “Write from grace, not pain.” When I heard those words, I thought of Hemingway, and of my father.

Writing from grace, the author explained, means writing with restraint. “I felt nothing but pain and grief, but I knew that if my story was to succeed in helping other people, it would have to be written with restraint.”

Again, hearing his words, I thought of my own father, and suddenly it came to me that what I mistook for taciturnity in Dad was simply a gentlemanly restraint. And that’s what Stoicism really is — not an absence of feeling, but a restraint of the impulse to vocalize virtually everything you think and feel. And then something else occurred to me, something about my writing.

“Self-expression is not, in itself, communication. Good writing involves discipline and self-restraint.” That was me, 45 years ago, instructing my students at the University in my English and composition classes. Good advice. And now I have to take it to heart all over again.

I’ve been writing a lot about my illness lately and my distress about my illness, candidly, in some detail, and as one friend wrote back, sometimes with “more information” than you really need. ; - ) I’ve attempted to describe even those moments of self-pity. Why? Because I’ve been laboring under the conviction that it might be helpful to you other humans who are also mortal, and will suffer similar indignities, or just make up some of your own!

But no more. No more detail. No more mention of my condition in these essays. If things improve, if there’s good news, I’ll include it in a brief cover note, but I shall not refer to my illness or treatment in these posts again.

I shall instead practice the restraint, and the self-censorship my dad did. And if an unconscious motive in writing about my condition has been to help me cope with it, as writing so often does, it has served its purpose. I have coped, and have no concerns about doing so in the future.

Not with the dialysis at any rate. I’m sure other trials await.

Making Toast

2010-06-03T06:36:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

So on Wednesday I’m having a very rough morning, fearful that the peritoneal dialysis isn’t working, isn’t going to work, that I’ll be forced either to go back on hemodialysis, that waking nightmare, or else…let nature take its course.

And I’m feeling the effects of the kidney failure, without any real treatment since last Saturday’s clinic visit. Severe fatigue, exhaustion really, and nausea.

And I’m idly watching Charlie Rose, which I have flagged on our TV set top box for automatic recording, this one his show from Tuesday night. There is a spirited debate about the consequences of Israel’s attack on the humanitarian fleet of six boats bound for Gaza, and then it comes on: “Making Toast.”

It’s a simple enough story. Roger Rosenblatt, an author, has written a book about the premature death of his daughter, and the grief-stricken family survivors. He tells how he and his wife moved in with the widower, their son-in-law, and his young kids, their grandchildren, and will stay there “forever.” Grandparents become parents, again.

Then Rosenblatt describes a time when he was sitting in the car with his wife, waiting for their youngest son at a train station, and he felt a hand pat him on the knee in a comforting fashion, and he looked over at his wife, but it wasn’t her at all; she was looking out the window…

And as I listen to this story, suddenly, I feel a presence behind me, someone standing behind my chair and offering me comfort, telling me, “It’s alright. It’s going to be alright.” It’s my dad. And I begin weeping, and the whole thing sweeps over me, my ordeal, yes, but also his. How he died of lung disease over a period of five long, tortured years. And I realize that he is the only person who can really understand what I’m going through. He had mornings like this.

His presence comforts me in a way nothing else, no one else, has been able to do since this whole ordeal began. And I know that he’ll know the answer to my question, the one burning a hole in my brain since the failure of Tuesday’s treatment session. “If this peritoneal catheter doesn’t work, can I possibly endure going back on hemodialysis? Those three hour sessions three times a week?”

His answer is swift and sure. “Yes, you can, Denny Boy. And you have to. You owe it to yourself, and to all the people who love you.” So there it is. I’ve got my answer. I’ve made my decision. This is what a decent man would do. This is what my father, a decent man, did. He endured five years of pain and suffering instead of taking the easy way out.

When all we can do is go on, life is as simple as making toast.

So I weep some more, not out of self-pity, but some kind of sorrow for my dad, for the whole human race. “Ah, Humanity!” Yep, there it is again, the whole sweep of tragedy and love that is the Human Comedy. All I need now is a little Shakespeare.

On the iBook store shelves are about fifty free electronic books for download, and I’ve downloaded a dozen or so already, including two of my very favorites, the King James Bible and the Collected Works of Shakespeare. Reading a book on the iPad is a wondrous experience indeed, as they have built in the illusion of turning a page, instead of the “button pushing fade out/fade in” of the Kindle. You can also add bookmarks, write notes in the margin, and from the index go instantly to any section of any page you want.

How fortuitous it is that the iPad arrived at about the time I started the hemodialysis! Spending three hours three times a week reading books, watching movies and music videos, playing “Air Harp” or “Electronic Piano,” ain’t a bad fate. Not so bad at all.

Flyboy Killer Smile

2010-06-01T05:44:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

I’ve never liked John McCain. Never felt sorry for his imprisonment in Vietnam, where he bombed villages and innocent civilians from the air, jet skiing off into the wild blue yonder. He should have been shot for murder, tortured with water boarding.

And now McCain threatens a filibuster over the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell.” This man could have been president, if he hadn’t run for office in the wake of that other flyboy, George W. Bush and his slimy disasters. John McCain: Murderer as Puritan Archangel.

So tell me the greater sin. Thou Shalt Not Kill? Thou Shalt Not Kiss Thy Fellow Marine?

I’m angry at the man. His self-righteous attitude is almost as bad as my own, but I’m not a public office holder. That killer smile, followed by that grim frown. Arizona border skirmish refugee. Veteran I’d most like to memorialize.

He advocated amnesty, now deportation. He wanted NATO expanded right up to the borders of Russia, NATO, which was created to defend Western Europe from the Soviets, who ceased to exist after bankrupting themselves in Afghanistan as we do now. And they went and ruined that Old Cold War, the spoilsports. There goes the Military/Industrial Complex into a tailspin. But they’ve certainly recovered now!

History in the rear view mirror, specialty of McCain and the GOP. Hate deficit spending unless its military waste. Supported Bush tax cuts for the Super Rich. Supported prescription drug coverage for Medicare patients, promoted by Big Pharma which reaps billions, along with these provisions: no price bargaining or negotiation, no letting Americans buy their drugs in Canada, lock us up tight. Corrupt!

Corruption to the core. Took on Sarah Palin as a running mate without a clue to who she was, what she would do, how she would trash his staff with her first book. Didn’t know what to say in the wake of the investment bank crash and bailout, except, “American banks are solvent.” Duh! Would be laughable if not so very pathetic.

Where’s his sense of honor? Where are his conservative values and the ideals of personal freedom? Religious Right fear and hatred of homosexuals? Libertarians laugh and shrug. The good old dependable War on Drugs? Ditto. Ron Paul wants to legalize them. And he’s from Texas!

13,000 gays and lesbians have been dismissed from the military since “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was made law, some of the best and brightest who ever served. With an all-volunteer armed services, and so many rotating tours of duty to serve in the wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s hard enough to find capable, educated, intelligent volunteers without this nonsense.

More than two dozen foreign militaries, as well as our own CIA, FBI and Secret Service, allow homosexuals to serve openly, and they find that a uniform code of conduct is the key to their success. But opponents say that military housing for gay couples will be a problem, especially for couples married in states that permit it, that bunking traditions may have to be revised, that discipline and re-enlistment will also be problematic without the ban.

As usual, this issue is another national character test. While most Americans react with a big yawn, characters like McCain continue to embarrass themselves with their haughty threats. They fail the character test for intellect and honor. McCain is just a big McJerk!

I am so glad that we didn’t elect this man our president. No matter what weaknesses and flaws President Obama exhibits, he is ten times the man McCain is. And while Bill Clinton didn’t have the guts or political power to resist “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Obama is pushing the repeal through Congress. And that’s just the right thing to do.

In Memoriam

2010-05-31T06:42:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other, because, of course, Americans were fighting each other from both sides of the conflict. In 1886, Memorial Day was established to honor those many thousands of dead, and it’s good to remember that as we fire up the barbecue or go shopping.

There will be two ceremonies today in Alameda — one on the carrier U.S.S. Hornet, which fought in World War II, carrying Jimmy Doolittle and his raiders into their famous raid over Tokyo early in the war, giving a tremendous boost to morale back home — and the other near our house at the flagpole and memorial plaques at the entrance to the community of Harbor Bay.

I won’t be tottering over there on my cane, but Diane will drive me to a couple of stores for some necessary supplies, including food for my aquatic turtles and tropical fish. I’m gradually resuming my household chores and hope to do a little gardening this week, prying some invasive daisies out of the lawn and weeding around one rose bush which has just come back from the dead with a glorious burst of red blossoms.

On this day, I remember those I knew who fought in combat, including one who died in the Battle of the Bulge, my cousin Stanley. My uncle Bob, who fought all across the Pacific in the U.S. Navy; my professor and mentor Marvin Mudrick who fought across those Pacific Islands as well, in the Army; another professor and friend, Ed Loomis, who led a machine gun squad across Europe; and a third professor of mine, Douwe Stuurman, in Army Intelligence, who was among the first forward troops into Berlin, ahead of the Soviets.

And there’s my dear friend Larry Settles, who fought five tours of duty as an Airborne Ranger in Vietnam, and died years later of neurological injuries he received there. And of course, Paul Fossum, Navy SEAL with a Navy Cross and a warrior of the first rank who visited Alameda recently and regaled us with stories of his life.

For several years, Diane and I, as “Lazzari & Green Advertising,” worked for client Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. We produced a big, in-depth brochure about its history, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, great American landscape architect who also designed New York City’s Central Park, the Stanford University Campus, and consulted on the design of Yosemite National Park and of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A champion of the move to naturalism, Olmsted blended the manmade with the natural landscape and his visions continue to amaze.

Every year for Mountain View, we produced a Memorial Day Service, complete with speeches by local civic leaders, and a memorial ritual including a Scottish bagpipe marching band. The mournful tunes they played brought a hush over the gathered crowd. And those moments transcended ritual and ceremony, becoming positively spiritual.

Struggling as I am with the renal failure this year, Memorial Day takes on yet another new meaning, and the solemnity I feel is lightened by great joy that I am still among the living.

Absolute Certainty

2010-05-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

By Dennis Green

Yud Resh Ayin! “By using this name, I fill my head with certainty! Certitude! Conviction! Sureness! Trust!” I needed to be broken before I could be strong! And I get just the strength I need from the “Weekly Kabbalah Tune-up,” from Yahuda Berg. Maybe I’m not as lapsed a Jew as I thought!

Or I share a spiritual curiosity about myself, with my chum the incisive art photographer Nate Bennett, who loaned me the book, The Seventy-Two Names of God, and sent me the link to the Kabbalah Centre.

As they say, “What does not kill me makes me stronger!” Much stronger. In all my many broken places, in fact, I have grown a knot of character around each break that serves me well. Come join me in a state of absolute certainty!

It’s better than sureness, or the sneaking suspicion that you might be right about something, (for a change). It compares to confidence the same way the peace that passeth understanding compares to relaxation. And I think they must be related, for I feel the same softness and absence of tension throughout not only my body, my extremities, my fingertips, but also throughout my psyche, my mind, my soul, my heat.

I believe that both these states of mind and being come from a state of Grace, and I‘ve lauded that miraculous gift quite enough. So let’s move on. Does absolute certainty have any practical application in everyday life? That’s more interesting and compelling than abstract philosophies, after all.

Absolute certainty can serve one well in community and political life, let me assure you! When certain issues arise, if you’re well-read and informed, and have a modicum of sense when it comes to evaluating both sides, you can come down on one side or the other with absolute certainty. You may lose, as I often have, but so what? If you were on the right side, it counts in your karma account.

So where do we go now? What do we do next? I’ve started a new story, which may be a novel, a long short story, or a novella, An Independent Man, which explores that question, on my own behalf in some respects, but also as a question for YOU, and for the entire American culture, and the Zeitgeist itself. What’s next?

Well, I suspect it will have a lot to do with new technologies, since we now have a broader spectrum of the types of devices available to us for the purpose of communication, creativity and also entertainment. The iPad resets the notch of excellence of ease of use among digital producers. Like all advances in civilization, the “Third Wave,” as Alvin Toffler called it, has changed our lives. Digital cameras changed Kodak; digital picture frames changes display; online music sharing changed that industry forever.

E-books are changing the publishing industry; streaming video, (and 3-D) are changing movies; and TV is next, with HD, ultra-thin screens and now 3-D in televisions as well, along with online “broadcasting, is changing TV forever.

Networks beware. Of that I have absolute certainty.

Hell's Angels

2010-05-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

The good news is that one more session of hemodialysis, on Saturday, tomorrow, will probably be my last. I start peritoneal dialysis training next week, which I’ve done before, and which is much less hellish than hemo. There is really no bad news. But after six weeks, and on my way out, I suddenly realized today how much adjusting I’ve done at the hemo clinic.

There is a real community of like souls there, in spite of our many differences, and even though it’s definitely the Ninth Circle of Hell. Today, a Hawaiian gentleman all puffed up by water retention helped me in the door, and was very friendly. And Nurse Irene has a crush on me. I tease her about bringing in some port wine next time to relax a bit. “A big canteen of the stuff!” I laugh. She does too.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday afternoons the same patients come for dialysis, and most of the same attendants. They were a little underhanded yesterday, and Irene was a’hoppin’ and a’jumpin’ and even a little stressed out. At the end of my three hours, though, my blood pressure was a little high, so she made me sit until it come down under a hundred.

So I pondered it in my heart today while in hemo…how we humans adapt, bond and share whatever it is we have in common. That applies to writers in a writing group who share a love of words as much as the audience at a Grateful Dead Concert who share a love of the music. But in medical or therapeutic situations, the bond is often based on mutual disabilities or illnesses.

I took a T’ai Chi class at Alameda Hospital for three years, and became very tight with my classmates, many of whom had also suffered heart attacks, or even, as I had, bypass surgery. There was one older Chinese gentleman in his Nineties, whose wife and daughter came with him just to make sure he didn’t fall during some of our more strenuous stretching poses. The bond was quiet but powerful there.

When I worked at Children’s Hospital Oakland, I observed the bonding that took place between parents of, say, kids with cystic fibrosis, who sometimes took classes together in such techniques as clearing the lungs of their kids with some vigorous thumps to the chest, or the parents of diabetic kids who had to learn how to test blood sugar levels, keep the sick kids to a special diet, and know what to do in case of a diabetic coma.

These medical groups tend to be very practical, but also have about them, over time, a spiritual dimension. Any stress that reinforces one’s sense of mortality will do that. And for me, over the past six weeks, the prayers and blessings and just plain positive, affectionate thoughts from my Chums has made a huge difference in my regaining my will to live. Quite honestly, I was within days of calling off all treatment and just letting myself go to that last big sleep.

Now, at this point, I will endure almost anything to have a few more decades with Diane. If I do, I’ll no doubt outlive my darling dog Lucca, but if I can be there for her in her final days and hours, love and comfort her, make sure she’s not in pain, I will be thankful.

I see people at the hemo clinic who are on their last legs, who have strokes during their therapy, or go into shock. Anyone over 65 knows as well that they are very unlikely candidates for transplant. Anyone over 50 has to agree to accept the kidney of a donor who is also over 50, or even older. It’s quite an exclusive little club!

And we feel sorry for each other, rather than feeling sorry for ourselves.

SilverSmiths

2010-05-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

Today, I felt like regaling myself with some of my Navajo, Zuñi and Yurok silver jewelry — two inlaid bracelets by Yurok silversmith and artist David Ipeña, a huge silver “Sunburst” Navajo bracelet, signed “DTH,” and a big oval silver Zuñi sunburst belt buckle with a turquoise stone in its middle, unsigned. The magic of silver is the same as that which resides in the clear flowing water of a mountain stream, so I am made new.

And I’m wearing my $500 Marc Nason boots, hand made in Italy of exotic black scuffed leather, with the Gothic crosses on the sides repeated in two tiny silver pulls on the zippers. An indulgence I’m probably still paying for, these boots, but wot the hell… Because I had an appointment with my surgeon today, and she stabbed a long needle into my belly without any anesthesia, I figured I would need some Gothic armor.

The peritoneal catheter, though, is healing nicely, except for the hard knot of fluid under the last incision, and Dr. O’Neill tells me I’ll be able to start peritoneal dialysis training next week. That means six more sessions of hemo, but now that I’ve established a major flirtation with my nurse, Irene, (“Good night, Irene, Irene/I’ll see you in my dreams!”), I can bear it. The iPad certainly helps.

It’s interesting how the material world and the spiritual/emotional world intersect. Makes me suspect the two aren’t as separate, or different as we thought, after all.

It was 40 years ago, when I was still teaching at UCSB, that it started. One of my students opened a store in Santa Barbara, “Ya-Ta-Hey,” dedicated to the study and promotion of Southwest Native American tribal art and jewelry. That’s where I bought the Sunburst Navajo turquoise bracelet. I paid several hundred dollars for it, a huge sum for me at the time, but I was a goner. And today, it’s worth several thousand.

The day I met Diane, we were both wearing Zuñi inlay bracelets, by chance, but it sparked some wonderful connection. She has been collecting tribal art and jewelry longer than I have, and has many more excellent pieces to show for it. Our house is like a New Mexico & Tlingit Museum!

And I know full well the magic contained in these works of art. In the tribes, the artist, the silversmith, the dream worker is one of the most highly regarded members of the tribe. They bring the Next World into this one, and what they create is Power.

I am part Lakota, descended from Crazy Horse, the Sioux chief who led his warriors into battle at the Little Big Horn, and may have personally taken Custer’s scalp. From the Great Spirit, I got my Lakota name, “Lone Wolf,” when I was only nine years old, in a vision in Blue Lake, California. I have been fascinated by Native American lore ever since.

David Ipeña was the only artist working in paintings and silver jewelry in his tribe. Their traditional craft was basket weaving. I have three signed silver pieces by Ipeña, and an ink line drawing. While I was having bypass surgery, Diane found a silver Yurok warrior pendant by Ipeña, in 1996, which I wear to this day. That same month, the artist died of a heart attack while hiking on Mt. Tam, and if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is!

Sins of the Drug Wars

2010-05-26T05:03:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

How very liberal and enlightened! In America, in most parts of the country anyway, the possession or use of marijuana is a minor offense, often punishable by a small fine, rarely by imprisonment. But the sale or cultivation of marijuana — unless protected by legalization for medical purposes — is a felony punishable by imprisonment. Consequently, many thousands of Americans languish in prison, costing the taxpayers on average $100,000 per year each, for doing something most of us acknowledge is harmless to the user, or even beneficial. Doh!

But the real harm — the terrible harm — being done by the U.S. drug war is in Mexico, where approximately 100,000 people have died in a bloody battle between the drug cartels and the Mexican army and police. Fully 60% of the revenue going to the Mexican drug cartels is from marijuana, and most of that weed is exported to the U.S. Without that revenue, the cartels would shrivel, or even die.

While our own DEA pressures Mexico to wage that war on its own soil, knowing full well that a simple change in our laws would drastically reduce, or even eliminate the problem, a stalemate between the two countries continues. But the legalization of marijuana would also mean a huge reduction in the DEA law enforcement budget, and in the budgets of state and local law enforcement agencies, and prison systems, all across America! Mercy me.

The Second Great Depression may yet be avoided, but the Second Prohibition is still with us, started by president Richard Nixon and promoted heavily by First Lady Nancy and President Ronald Reagan, and it’s not working any better than the first Prohibition did. As a tactic of the conservative counter-revolution, it was a smashing success, but as a prevention program, the War on Drugs, specifically marijuana, has been and continues to be an abject failure.

The epidemic of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angles is a proof in point. If allowed to increase, there would be more marijuana dispensaries than bars.

We know it’s harmless, less harmful at least than alcohol, tobacco and even caffeine, and yet we tolerate a prohibition that makes only top criminals and cops rich, and we also perpetuate enforcement strategies that focus on the inner city rather than college campuses or senior centers, where abusers of prescription drugs are legion.

But a national hypocrisy so huge and damaging that it kills thousands of people and imprisons thousands more is not just an amusing aberration in the collective psyche, but a mortal sin. And it’s so Middle Class, so pathetic an attempt to give the polite nod to conformity and sobriety, that it’s a massive national embarrassment.

We have an opportunity in California this November for redemption, with Prop 14, by making the recreational use of marijuana as legal as the medical use. But the outcome will be very close, determined probably by the demographics of voter turnout. If older voters predominate, legalization is likely to fail.

They may call it the “Tea Party,” but they probably don’t smoke tea. Unless people under 30 vote in big numbers, (and why should they, without an Obama to support?), pot is doomed to go on killing people in Mexico and the ghettos, and not by second-hand smoke.

Writerly Reflections

2010-05-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, even as a very young boy, but I’ve never thought much about my writing. Until now. How I write, what I write, how I go about it.

From this side of the eyeballs, I’m just a story teller. I simply sit down to tell a story. “Once upon a time…” In a sense, I’m re-telling a story, maybe something I heard in my sleep, a story I like well enough that I think you will too.

But I listen to Scott Turow talk about his writing, as Charlie Rose asks him some questions, such as, “Why do you write so much dialogue?” And that gets me thinking about it. Scott answers, “Oh, I just write down what I hear. I hear these people talking, and I just write it down.”

And that’s about how dialogue comes to me. But there’s more. “I write,” he then says, “for the same reason that all writers do, because it’s a matter of survival, it’s the only way I have of making peace with myself.” A supremely confident man, I find his manner almost off-putting, until I recognize where I have encountered it before. In myself.

A chum, Els, also a writer, tells me that she enjoys writing description, dialogue, “scenes,” far more than she does writing narrative. And she is rather amazed, or amused, that I use narrative so much, not even as a device, but just as my natural voice. Els says she likes the experience in the writing of “being in the here and now” which writing description and dialogue does for her, and that sense of immediacy doesn’t hold any special pleasure for me.

It may also be that I prefer the god-like perspective of the ÜberVoice.

And I usually start a story with an idea, one which can be summed up, or pointed at, with a simple phrase, a title. I proceed the way the ripples on the surface of water from a stone dropped thereon might proceed, in the most natural process I can imagine. If it’s an op-ed piece, I try to make a convincing argument, which is also a kind of story. “Once upon a time there was an idea…”

The Charlie Rose show comes to an end, and with the closing refrains of music, as usual, my dog Lucca sets up a howling, and a singing, and a guttural longing that is curious and amazing indeed. She then finishes up her marrow bone, comes across the room, stands in front of me and licks her lips, once, twice. Meaning: I want to go outside now.

I let the dog out the back door, and leave it closed but unlatched. She will lie on the back porch for fifteen minutes, then come back inside and flop down on the floor, where she will doze. (How’s that for immediacy?)

I have invested a good deal of my time and attention in the subject of aging, of growing old. In fact, I’ve been at it now since my mid-fifties, getting a jump on old age itself and putting an early end to those fiddling middle age years. (How’s that for narrative?)

Sometimes I take great delight in executing some sort of rhetorical flourish. It might be bringing an essay back around to its own title, even using the same phrase in a final or penultimate sentence. But when I do that, I can feel my self-conscious mind rising to the surface, making itself felt, and then known clearly by the tracks it leaves behind. And I like to let it sink back down out of sight.

These writerly reflections don’t come all that naturally to me, as I say, and so this particular bit of writing on these two pages is all of it more self-conscious than my usual writerly state. So much for humility!

The Failure of American Education

2010-05-22T08:42:00.001-07:00

by Dennis Green

Catholic schools in America have a 90% graduation rate. Public schools, by contrast, graduate only two-thirds of their students, on average. America, which spends more per pupil than any other nation, produces student outcomes in the very bottom ranks of all students worldwide. This crisis in education is finally being addressed, and by some unlikely sources.

The American Education Federation and the American Education Association — the national teachers’ unions — are the biggest and most powerful employee unions in America. They contribute huge sums of money to political campaigns, maintain extensive lobbying efforts, and exert tremendous influence with lawmakers. What is their view of education, and what it needs, how and why it is failing?

“Resources and innovation.” They say that more money is the only solution to all our woes. Yet, 93% of our local AUSD budget goes for salaries and benefits, mostly to teachers, and the rest to a few administrators, custodians, and other service and clerical personnel. Chances are that any new money going into that budget will go to raises and contracted benefits, which often mean no employee contribution, and to shortfalls that the district must make up for any losses by pension investment funds — hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide in the past few years.

But a whole new movement is underway — by those who believe that the secret to better education outcomes lies in the quality of the teaching itself — with better prepared, mentored and managed teachers. And they call for merit pay, based on a complex of student test scores, observation of teacher classroom command and presence, and extensive teacher interviews.

Reform of American Education began with President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program, which emphasized the importance of standardized testing and the ranking, (and financial reward or punishment), of performing and failing schools. The program also sparked the creation of charter schools, which are free of school district management and union contracts, and are open for enrollment to children from any home in the district.

Critics of this program point to many schools assuming a strategy of “teaching to the test.” They also note, especially in the humanities and arts, the inability of standardized tests to measure a student’s progress. They defend the concept of “neighborhood schools” as well, often code language for de facto segregation.

Reformers say that teachers are always taking credit for their students’ success, but don’t want to be held accountable for their failures. They say that teachers often blame parents, culture and the students themselves for poor educational outcomes, instead of assuming any responsibility for their own efforts.

President Obama’s new program, “Race to the Top,” is a contest designed to encourage and reward reform, especially toward greater teacher preparation, support and accountability. And it also encourages school choice, a lifting of the caps on charter schools, and strategies for closing achievement gaps. In Round One of the program, 48 states failed to qualify, largely because of union resistance.

Teachers’ unions’ biggest achievements are tenure and seniority — code language, respectively for lifetime job security, regardless of performance, (tenure), and highest pay and stronger job security for the oldest teachers in the face of layoffs, again, regardless of performance, (seniority). Such protectionism and lack of accountability are hardly the dreams of those early union activists fighting and dying in the streets for workers’ rights.

Obviously, the failure of American education will not be turned around so long as those at the very head of the class are never graded.

Tiny Pleasures

2010-05-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

An extreme crisis in one’s life — medical or financial or romantic — can bring with it one unexpected benefit. Even the smallest pleasures loom very large, as the strained proportions of appreciation stretch both ways.

Proportion is a big part of this phenomenon, but in extremis, tells us that normality may be the distortion, and this magnification of pleasure may be the norm.

When you can’t leave the house, can barely walk down the hall, your world shrinks, but then suddenly expands again as minutiae take on a wholly new significance. When there is a tremor in the right hand, and two catheters penetrating your flesh, the body itself takes on a whole new aura of meaning.

But what causes me the greatest fascination these days is the iPad. and that is because it resembles in strange ways the workings of the human mind. It’s the touch screen. Quirky. Ephemeral. Capable of multi-tasking and of overload.

There are many functions that respond to simply touching the screen. Tapping it once does one thing, tapping it twice does another, and tapping it three times brings forth yet another charm. Pressing and dragging moves icons around. Squeezing the fingers together or apart can enlarge type font or another image, or shrink it, place it, move it and in Pages wrap text around it in different layouts and configurations. And with the iPad, apps are available that create a keyboard, like a piano, or the strings of a guitar, with corresponding sounds.

I have downloaded more apps than I can possibly use. One features a fish pond, complete with bird sounds in the background and carp swimming below. Touch the surface of the “water” and you will hear the sound of rippling water. Another features a wide variety of handguns. Touch the trigger of one and the iPad resonates with the sound and an approximation of the relative recoil of that particular weapon.

Many of the apps for the iPad are based on those designed originally for the iPhone, but re-designed for use on the new device. Because the screen is larger and more responsive, the touch factor can be expanded. And it doesn’t always work, multi-touch, or calls up a feature, such as the magnifier along the edge of a page in Pages, which allows you to jump to another part of the manuscript, when you didn’t intend to. Mental.

What I’ve always loved about Apple engineers has been the “intuitive” nature of their software designs. (And on the contrary, when Microsoft stole Windows from Apple, it turned it into a clunky, clumsy way to navigate the screen and applications — the very epitome of “nerd.”) But when it comes to being intuitive, the iPad, with its touch screen and simplicity — no mouse or keyboard — is even more so. Consequently, there is virtually no manual, except online, and really no need for one. Commands and functions come so naturally you just need intuition, and a little common sense, to figure them out.

The sheer genius of the size and simplicity of the iPad is what makes it so revolutionary. Large enough to fill your field of vision when it is propped up in your lap, yet small enough and close enough for the experience to be incredibly intimate — that’s what makes it such a pleasure, if a tiny one. Watching a movie or music video, reading a newspaper, magazine or book, or writing an email or a story in Pages is a sheer delight!

I’m sure this new toy coming into my life under any circumstances would have been exciting. But with the rest of my world so shrunken, this little baby opens new doors of perception, experience and enjoyment I didn’t even know existed!

Letting Nature Take Its Course

2010-05-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

by Dennis Green

Nature. The Natural World. We think of Nature as something exotic, a world apart from and parallel to this one, the world in which we live, a world of concrete and metal and constructed housing. Nature is the great outdoors, the uncivilized parts of the world.

But no…it’s right here. NATURE R US! Inside us, all around us. The workings of Nature — that’s all there is, finally. “What you can depart from is not the Process.” So where do we get our notions of “the unnatural,” our concern that the ways of Nature itself can be thwarted?

If I, and my doctors, were to just “let Nature take its course” right now, I would be dead. As it was, that first week I was hospitalized with renal failure, there was so much resistance on the part of my attending physicians and bedside nurses that I did almost die. I asked for peritoneal dialysis, and they were all reluctant, because very few dialysis patients can tolerate the regimen — only 7% of all patients on dialysis.

The first time I went on dialysis, the process was very gradual, and I worked up to it, taking training classes in the abstract, getting the peritoneal catheter inserted surgically, letting it heal and “rest” for several weeks before using it, then gradually introducing manual dialysis, at first simply overnight. Fill, sleep, drain.

So Dr. O’Neill reconstructed her original surgery about three weeks after the first effort, shaving off some of the little fatty drapery than hangs down into the cavity and was blocking the catheter from draining. She may have repositioned the catheter slightly, its intake valves, or pinned back the fleshy “drapery” that might have been blocking the draining and I know that she trimmed some of the fatty tissue away. I’m sure it ordinarily serves some useful, evolutionary function. After all, the peritoneal cavity wasn’t built as a reservoir for dialysis fluids!

Medical science, in fact, is the unnatural manipulation of natural processes in the service of life extension and health enhancement. I’m just lucky that my nephrologist, Dr. Law, identified me as a candidate for peritoneal dialysis rather than the “warehousing” of hemo. I may even be able to get off hemo after only four or five more sessions.

But I will never forget that huge room, that “warehouse” where dozens of patients lie on couches, on the nod, semi-comatose, while the machines circulate and filter their blood. A disproportionate number of Asian and African-American people, many older than 70, and it occurs to me that this is a very lucrative business. Rent a warehouse, train ten people per shift, stock thousands of gallons of dialysis fluid…get rich.

I hope to be saying my farewells to this strange world, where a state other than life carries on. It can carry on without me.

Somewhere back there in my past, life goes on undisturbed. Nature takes its course. Healthy people run and play and laugh and swim. For now, I am stranded on this little island where nothing is normal, nothing is natural, nothing is the same as it was. “On Dialysis…” I will say, and people will shrug sympathetically, without even a glimmer of awareness what this means.

Late breaking news: letting Nature take its course, yesterday my bladder finally let go of its contents on its own, without the horrible hard plastic catheter being pushed all the way up inside it, and I am feeling very optimistic. I may even get off dialysis again!